It’s easy to do—don’t issue any credentials. It’s just that the very lucrative businesses don’t want to do that because they know exactly what they are selling and it ain’t education.

It so happens that looking after the mechanics of (computer based) university examination is part of my current role. We do have some mechanisms in place that are intended to make it harder to cheat, but ultimately some students will cheat and one of the interesting things is watching the reaction of a young colleague who went from those exams (a year ago) to his current job, at this same university.

For example there are signs outside every exam room prominently warning students that the university owns video cameras and they are being watched while doing exams. It's true, but of course the main reason we're watching isn't to catch cheaters but to anticipate problems the room's invigilators are about to call us about. Are we watching to see if that girl is wearing a short skirt because she's written notes on her own thighs? Are we watching to see if the Fitbit on that guy's wrist has been modified to display relayed multiple choice answers? No, we're watching because the room has 85 green "OK for this exam: BIOL1024 Genetics" screens and one orange "Pre-check failed. DO NOT USE" screen and in a minute the retired administrator herding students into the room is going to remember that we said Orange = Bad during training and call us about it, by the time they do we want to know why it has an orange screen, whether that room is actually booked for 86 students so that they can't just leave the machine unused, and where else on campus we can put one extra student if we need to move them pronto. We aren't trying to actually fix it, because that's likely to take hours, and we have minutes or sometimes seconds.

One of the most valuable uses of those cameras doesn't actually involve seeing anybody, cheater or not, student or not, at the end of the day if there's one PC which stubbornly claims to still be doing an exam, is it really? If the room is empty, maybe even dark, then the answer is that despite instructions to students and invigilators they left a machine logged in, running an exam, and just walked out of the room. On the other hand, if there's still people stood in the room looking at the PC, well, radios work both ways, lets find out why the hell they aren't finished.

Since we were little, we were requested by our parents to get a good grade in examinations in order to, eventually, get into a good college.

We were told that graduating from a good college brings ourselves/the family a better quality of life, but the "benefits" part stops here. People don't care about those knowledges that are not likely to make us money one day. Most of us just study for a better paying jobs.

The society doesn't care about the process, but the outcome, evaluated by the momey in our bank account.

This is not really an issue that affects anyone outside a handful of individuals getting their first job - once you have an employment history, the fact that someone was willing to pay you money for a couple years is a pretty solid signal that you were doing at least an OK job, and you'll have coworkers with similar reputational signals who can also attest to this.

(although tbh I think references as a hiring signal are going away - referrals to an open position within the referrer's company are still a golden ticket but nobody cares that you have three friends at some unrelated company who will say that you're not a total shitbird, they can already tell that from the fact that you worked there 2 years and weren't fired and it's trivial for someone to "forge" a reference if it's not. References, like suits in the office, were a boomer thing and in the latter years were a symptom of a highly employer-favored labor market. Skilled workers can now write their own ticket and even in the broader labor market nobody cares about references when employers can't hire enough employees to keep product on the shelf. A whole lot of stupid, artificial barriers that never should have existed are coming down, and references are one of them.)

Anyway, this is a lot like the "it's unjust that under-21s can volunteer or be drafted to die for their country but can't drink!!!" argument - yup, it's true, that's unfair as hell, but nobody who's over the age of 21 gives a single shit about remedying it, since it doesn't affect them. In "agile" terms, it's a ticket where there is definitely improvement that is possible in this area, but no business case to upend everything and do the improvement. Once you have that first job under your belt... nothing that came before really matters. When was the last time an interviewer asked a senior engineer about a GPA? Unless it's an ivy-tier they frankly don't even care where you went, Bumfuck State University is just as good as Podunk State University. Nor does the Widget Factory care about whether you had a degree in English or Basketweaving when they are considering you for the position of forklift operator. It's an issue that solely matters to the people getting their first job, and once you're hazed, you're "in the club" and it stops mattering, unless you're such a complete and utter fuckup that you're getting fired repeatedly.

They do care a lot that you worked at a big name company, or that you made large contributions or substantially matured your skills/experience at a smaller company. They do care a lot that you appear knowledgeable around the role they're trying to hire you into. They do care a lot that you can problem-solve and learn the parts you don't know. References, degrees, and universities mostly stop mattering after a couple years and definitely stop mattering by the 10-year mark.

Again, I'm not saying you're wrong at all - and actually the whole system of making people go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for something that is basically only used to get you your first job and never matters again, is obviously problematic. But once again there's not really a way to remedy that, even if you banned asking about degrees entirely, employers are still going to find some similar signal, and it's going to hugely piss off all the people who are now $50k in debt for something they can't even use in an interview process.

Which is guaranteed, 100%, the reason that 99.9% of people went to get a degree. Yeah, education makes you a more well-rounded person, and it should be somewhere between "absolutely minimal costs subsidized hugely by the public" and "actually giving people a stipend to attend" (as in many european countries), because in the long term they are more than going to pay that back in taxes anyway, and we all benefit from having an intellectual workforce that can think critically and is less susceptible to misinformation campaigns/etc. But the reality is right now most people who go to college do so because it's a necessary gatekeeper to pass for you to get a good job.

We need some kind of reform though, this trajectory just doesn't seem sustainable. People have been pushing "trade school"/"coding bootcamp" approaches for years and it just hasn't stuck, there needs to be reform of the college system itself. But that's not remotely politically possible given the broad dysfunction of the american system.

Of course, there is certainly some "foundational" education around core computer-science and software-engineering concepts, and breadth of exposure to people with at least minimal competence in their fields (it's not always great, but neither is the broader job market) around various technologies and concepts that would need at least a multi-year "trade school" approach and not just a "coding boot camp" to replicate. It's not all bad either. But I think at this point everyone acknowledges we have a big problem and a bad trajectory.

Get rid of grading and nobody cheats.

Have a separate entity do the verification or make graduation more like PhD defense.

If it's for "pure" education or something with no grades, it's just a glorified library that sells expensive books.

The thing university seems to do the most these days is weed out people that don’t have the resources or ability to navigate the game put together which doesn’t have that much to do any more with education. A liberal education was by definition intended to make one free, now university is quite a lot about initiating people into wage slavery by putting them in serious debt and only graduating people who are good enough at following rules in complicated somewhat pointless exercises. It is unclear if this process is shaping or shaped by our economy.

I really don't feel sorry for people who attend Ivy league schools and rack up debt like that. They know exactly what they're getting into.

I didn't complete college and am making more than many of my peers who did and are still paying off debt 20 years later.

If you can't navigate college hand holding, you'll be fucked in the real world.

I believe college is currently serving it's function.

Testing is a distraction from their core values. And a crutch for handling the poor student to teacher ratio.

When undergraduate education goes well, the students will be interested in the material and motivated to learn it, both on their own and through working on collaborative projects with other students. Then testing and grading, while not necessarily eliminated, become less important in the students’ minds and cheating becomes only a minor problem.

Creating an environment conducive to that kind of learning, though, can be very difficult, especially with large classes, heavy teaching loads, and subjects and curricula that are perceived as requiring passive knowledge acquisition rather than active engagement and exploration.

I will retire next year after teaching for seventeen years at a large university in Japan. Cheating has sometimes occurred, both in my own classes and in the classes of a large first-year writing program I used to manage. But because the classes were mostly project-based, with students writing and revising in stages over the course of the semester and sharing their drafts with each other in class, and because the average class size has been only about fifteen, the amount of cheating has been small and manageable. I’ve been lucky.

> Testing is a distraction from their core values.

That's all fine, but nobody cares about your diploma if it was issued by a school that didn't test you.

So either we accept the modern role of the university, and fund them properly so they can do their task (and restrict the number of students), or reject it and go back to the old ways: you studied philosophy, congrats, but your father was a mason, here's your trowel.

I'm not sure what you mean by "old ways". The setup you describe is the one we already have. Family connections and money are key to getting a leg up.

Except college/testing doesn't rank meritocratically. It reproduces our existing structural hierarchies in the next generation. It would be simpler and more honest to give the kids of rich parents fast track internships.

The only people who actually care about your college grades are HR reading resumes for your first job, literally that’s it.

> The only people who actually care about your college grades are HR reading resumes for your first job, literally that’s it.

It's not about grades, it's about passing the requirements for a diploma. And the fact that only HR cares about it (in your rather corporate view of the labor market) is because everybody else assumes that the hurdle has been taken. They don't care about the diploma per se, just that you have a bunch of useful skills. Either HR tests you thoroughly (and they don't have a clue, so that's out of the question), or they rely on a system like the current one. Or do you think that a sociology degree qualifies you as a carpenter?

I used to study at an "elite" uni going for ~40% failed on the important exams to filter students and you bet everyone I knew was studying exclusively from previous exams and cheating when possible. This led to us being able to solve exam questions extremely quickly and cleanly but we often had no idea what the solution actually meant.

Some people were studying "normally" at first but they'd then get shafted in the exam because they'd have spent lots of time on material that's not graded in the end and would inevitably switch to the meta approach since understanding the material better doesn't mean much if you're barely surviving.

When I was in college, the rule in our department was that if you failed the final, you failed the course.

That is, I’d strongly prefer an exam where I can write an essay to show my understanding of a topic to a series of multiple choice questions where I just regurgitate the lectures.

Unfortunately, most of my professors reuse old content verbatim (usually content they didn’t even write themselves in the first place) and put it in the easiest to grade format possible (multiple choice/auto graded math). My CS classes are concerningly light on actually writing code.

When it came time to anything that involved presentations or demonstration of a project, I was exceptionally better at the topic. Maybe it was a better way of learning since I was more engaged, or the types of professors that heavily believe cheating is going to happen any way and try to mitigate it actually give a damn.

If college degrees themselves held no real value, and the purpose of a college education in terms of career was to prepare you for a comprehensive exam, I think you'd see radically different behavior. Grades would no longer matter, or even exist, so cheating your way through a class would seem pointless.

Creating a comprehensive exam that meaningfully tests a college degree's worth of education seems like it'd be near impossible though.

A goal directed attitude has taken over, as described by Erwin Chargaff.

https://mobile.twitter.com/blamlab/status/129727005174625894...

I'd much rather teach and talk and enjoy with my students, but, alas, the design of most universities box us in at different levels (and let's not even get started on the "must publish research" side of teaching).

Just my $0.02.

It's far from perfect, but it's better than the alternatives, and various organizations and people and powers-that-be reasonably want some kind of measure of whether someone actually learned something in a class/degree.