Quality: fast write-up (~45 minutes); little researched
I want a university that only does exams, which would include a description of what you need to know for the exams. Bonus would be suggestions for textbooks and online classes to learn the material, but that's optional.
Cost
The costs are:
- Exam creation
- Supervision
- Scoring
Exam creation is a fixed cost per topic per round (you need to change the exam each year).
Supervision, if in person, is partly a fixed cost per location, and partly a variable cost. (Someone can supervise students doing exams on different topics.) Online supervision would also be an option ideally.
Scoring is partially a fixed cost (the part that can be automated) and partially a variable cost (the part that need to be reviewed manually).
Frequency
Frequency of exams could change with demand, but, to start with, you could have one cheap exam per topic per year, timed with the end of normal school years. This would be the exam most people would take, so it would spread the fixed cost among more people. This might also be a more valuable test because it could position you on a normal curve more precisely given the greater amount of people taking it. There could also be more expensive tests throughout the year—more expensive given the fixed cost would be spread among fewer people.
Problem it solves
What this solves:
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Decouples learning and exams a) You can learn at your own pace (whether that's more slowly of faster) b) You can learn from wherever you want (maybe you want to learn from different places for different topics)
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Creates standardized tests making it easier to compare the competency of students between different schools
Why wanting exams in the first place? Because many governments want them for immigration and many organizations want them for employees.
Questions I have
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Has this been done?
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Could this be done? Could you have a university that only does exams and emits degrees that are recognized by the US government?
Current state
There are universities that don't require you to attend classes, but I still find those non-ideal because it's:
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Bias: In my experience, students that attend have an unfair advantage—Not because they learn more, but because teachers literally (and even intentionally) give unfair hints about their exams to reward students for showing up and justifying their salary.
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Inconvenient:
a) You need to be in a specific location for a few years.
b) You can still do some exams only once per year, which prevents doing a degree faster.
Future
While all I'm asking in this post is for non-zero universities to offer this so that the demand for it gets fulfilled, I also have the impression there would be significant benefits at a societal level from more fully decoupling exams and learning in general. It seems to me like test scores would become more meaningful, and it would become cheaper to get scored.
Very little of the value I got out of my university degree came from the exams or the textbooks. All of that I could have done on my own. Much of the value of the lectures could have been replicated by lecture videos. The fancy name on my resume is nice for the first few years (especially graduating in the middle of the 2009 recession) and then stops mattering.
But the smaller classes, the ones with actual back and forth with actually interested professors? The offhand comments that illustrate how experts actually approach thinking about their fields? The opportunities to work in actual labs even though anyone sane knew no undergrad was going to offer much more than a useful pair of hands in the 3-4 months they could devote to a project? The insights into how science and academia and industry actually work and what that meant for what kind of career I wanted? Those I don't think I would have gotten anywhere else.
The single biggest selling point of my undergrad institution was the unparalleled access to faculty and the resources available to do research internships with them. Ironically, I didn‘t take advantage of any of that, at all, and made my way through my BS as if I were at OP’s hypothetical institution. FWIW, I still ended up at my graduate school of choice, so maybe the research opportunities weren’t so valuable after all.