> do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system should be fixed, and that it’s not broken for fun but because there are some very difficult unresolved issues.
Because it conflates two things with conflicting incentives. This could and should resolve nicely.
1. Spreading knowledge
2. Certifying competence
To get e.g. a RHCE you may or may not attend the course. You may get the materials elsewhere and study from them, you might get tutoring from someone else who attended the course, you may have enough experience from your day job. This is knowledge acquisition.
Then you attend the certification exam and either succeeded or fail.
If you fail, you get back to knowdge acquisition. Decide to pay for the course this time. Get tutoring. Read the materials again. Maybe retry right away because you were just stressed and disoriented. Then you succeed.
Compare this with college. Fail a couple of examinations? Too bad, you are booted. Want to try again? Repeat up to two years! This is absolutely insane! No surprise people are cheating their way through!
Decouple knowledge acquisition from competence certification. Managed to reach end of the math track but failed physics? No problem! Certify math competence and let them study physics some more! Got enough certifications to warrant a title? Cool, give them the title!
Make it possible for people to step away for a couple of years and then come back to earn some more certifications and even the title when they actually need and want to learn those skills.
Make it possible to study 1/3 of your time for 15 years. Maybe people would stay in the learning mode longer. Unlike many doctors who are hopelessly behind the times. Make it possible to study with kids or sick parents to take care of. Make it a part of the adult culture.
Not something people had to suffer through in their youth to earn their place in the world.
This is it. To expand on further on why it's so crazy to couple education and credentialing - already know all the material in a class? Too bad, you have to pay for it and spend time taking it anyway. Is it a class that's completely unconnected to your field? Too bad, the university is making you take it, so you take it. Is the class taught poorly, so that you need to teach yourself outside of it? Too bad, you still have to pay for it and put time into it, in addition to actually teaching yourself the subject.
The education is the major chunk of time and cost, but the credentialing is what most people are trying to get. By forcing people to buy them together, you can make people pay a lot (in terms of both time and money) for an education they find little worth in just because it's the only way to get the credentials.
So true. And another benefit would be that domain experts giving a course could focus on teaching and sharing their knowledge instead of being forced to deal with all the organisational fluff around final grading and "catching cheaters" that is a giant waste of their time. (I see only usefulness in grading as a feedback mechanism for students – but not as "certification" of student's knowledge for the outside world. I also believe it would be more healthy for both students and teachers if you the grades were just a guidance tool, not something that will affect your future prospects at life).
At the end of the day the final grades from school / college grades depend on so many factors that this signal is close to noise anyway, but in college it often feels somehow more important than the actual learning and so much time and stress is spent on them.
In a better world I imagine it would be the organisations that need specific knowledge co-sponsoring "exam centers", separate from colleges, where you could go and get a certificate saying how well you know a given subject. Private companies that want to hire the best people actually have a good incentive to make these exams as fair and useful as possible.
To make an analogy with GAN networks in deep learning: the college would act as a generative part and "exam center" would be the discriminative part. It seems to work pretty well in ML, maybe it would work in education too?:D
I've thought engineering licensure found a reasonable balance.
Everyone has to pass the two certifying exams for their discipline, but there are multiple paths for assuming somebody has acquired the knowledge for the exam, ranging from years of industry work to passing standardized tests to having a college engineering degree.
It seems to me that a lot of problems in the real-world can be tracked down to unnecessary dependencies (in this case, having to attend college in order to get certified).
Because it conflates two things with conflicting incentives. This could and should resolve nicely.
1. Spreading knowledge 2. Certifying competence
To get e.g. a RHCE you may or may not attend the course. You may get the materials elsewhere and study from them, you might get tutoring from someone else who attended the course, you may have enough experience from your day job. This is knowledge acquisition.
Then you attend the certification exam and either succeeded or fail.
If you fail, you get back to knowdge acquisition. Decide to pay for the course this time. Get tutoring. Read the materials again. Maybe retry right away because you were just stressed and disoriented. Then you succeed.
Compare this with college. Fail a couple of examinations? Too bad, you are booted. Want to try again? Repeat up to two years! This is absolutely insane! No surprise people are cheating their way through!
Decouple knowledge acquisition from competence certification. Managed to reach end of the math track but failed physics? No problem! Certify math competence and let them study physics some more! Got enough certifications to warrant a title? Cool, give them the title!
Make it possible for people to step away for a couple of years and then come back to earn some more certifications and even the title when they actually need and want to learn those skills.
Make it possible to study 1/3 of your time for 15 years. Maybe people would stay in the learning mode longer. Unlike many doctors who are hopelessly behind the times. Make it possible to study with kids or sick parents to take care of. Make it a part of the adult culture.
Not something people had to suffer through in their youth to earn their place in the world.