This sort of standardised/independent testing would have a much more radical effect than the professor-teacher relationship. From my experience in the UK, plenty of people could get a decent grade at various humanities subjects just by doing a couple of weeks of 'revising' the subjects raised in exams and making sure they understood how it was graded.

True. Good point. I remember I did that myself once in high school. I and a few other pupils were dissatisfied with our religions teacher so we had a written and an oral exam with a teacher in another school instead of going to her classes. It worked very well and it seems to me I remember at least as much of that material (that I studied for those exams) as the material that I studied in my other classes.

I'm not sure the results would be overall good: you'd get more hothousing and less depth of knowledge etc. etc. But I think it would be quite meritocratic both for first-time students and for people in work who'd like to respecialise in something needing a new degree but find the costs of doing the course prohibitive.

Its hard to predict what would happen. But by and large I agree with Villiam's point that if the standardized tests are testing the wrong things, not giving enough depth of knowledge, then the primary solution should be to change the tests rather than to give up the whole idea of standardized testing.

The present system seems to me to be terribly cost-inefficient. The system I'm sketching need not be flawless in order to beat the present system, and we don''t need anything better than that to have a reason to start reforming.