[ssl232]

Agreed. Generations of students had their degree classifications determined by a small number of final exams under exam conditions. Why did we move away from that, opening up all of these routes to score degree grading in non exam conditions?

[matthewdgreen]

Lectures were originally created as a way to share a single book. Since printing was expensive, a reader would stand at a lectern and read the material aloud. You might say "why don't we have all the students share a single book, that worked fine" but the truth is it was a crummy solution to a resource constraint problem.

Similarly, exam-only courses are an excellent way to teach huge numbers of students without the costly hassle of grading homework assignments. But that doesn't mean they're an optimal solution.

From my experience as a student and now a professor, nothing can possibly compare to the benefit you get from hands-on learning. You get so much more understanding from the 20 hours you spent making a complex system work, than you will ever get in three 3-6 hours of in-class instruction you'd get during the same timeframe. And I have no good idea how to test for all the skills you learn from "writing a tiny OS kernel from scratch in C" or "building a compiler" or "implementing a complicated cryptographic protocol and then realizing an attack on it." I do observe that my students who do the homework tend to do much better on the exams, but I'm concerned that the incentive to take shortcuts will be much too high if homework isn't required.

[AngryData]

Just my personal theory, but maybe universities wanted to avoid being considered just pay-to-test institutions that couldn't justify their insane and continuously rising costs when the only thing that really mattered for a degree was passing an exam. Someone spending thousands of dollars just to skip every class but then show up and pass the exam test is not a good look for the university and could devalue the entire thing from the perspective of the public and potential future students. But if someone is required to go to every class nobody can easily claim the classes were pointless or bogus for passing exams and getting a degree because nobody can do that. Increases in overall schooling costs can also be explained away as more invested in classes whether it was true or not. And it makes people who were forced to attend classes whether they wanted to or needed to look disfavorably upon the potential for future students to be allowed to simply pass an exam by completely itself, in a sort of bucket of crabs situation where people think "I had to go through all this bogus stuff for my piece of paper, these younger kids should have to too!"

But I have zero qualifications for any of these opinions other than having been forced to attend a number of nearly worthless university classes that were pointless in the face of just reading the course book. Of course I also had some classes that were worth way more than just the book material, but probably half the classes I had to take I felt were dubiously useful to start with, not to mention the absolutely terrible actual class, and forcing people to attend to get a passing grade was just there to prevent 95% of the class being empty every week.