I agree.

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.

Which one is it: the idealized version where universities "teach you how to think" or the murky one that "socialise[s] you"? They're rather different.

> 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.

They're two different roles, but universities have traditionally done both and it has been effective. It's no use teaching Scientists how to think if they don't learn how to collaborate effectively and communicate their ideas to a wider audience.

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.

Yeah, I mean that's the idealistic view of what college is. I think this is an outdated view as we have the internet now and knowledge is incredibly easy to find if you can be bothered. Can't be bothered? The world needs ditch diggers too. If you can make it through college, you're cut out for non-ditch digging jobs.

You're basically saying that college is completely pointless except as a way to rank a meritocratic society.

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.