I have never understood why college professors / college classes are so uninnovative and have such an antagonistic approach to teaching/education. The entire grade culture at universities should be abolished in lieu of an evaluation system that is more reflective of the traits and skills that matter in industry and research environments. In CS programs geared towards helping graduates careers in industry, we should be rewarding students who help other succeed and in research oriented programs, we should have students conduct supervised research project oriented around their personal interests that require written and oral explanations of the work and why they choose the approach and what are the implications. There are so many easy ways to ensure cheating cannot occur that would also benefit students more than the current means of evaluation commonly used in higher education. On a semi related topic, if anyone is aware of research into experimental pedagogical approaches that move beyond traditional methods of evaluation and use concepts like mastery based learning in CS, I'd love to find a research group to work with on some ideas I have to improve instruction in CS and language learning.
You are completely right, the testing /score system is a terrible proxy for understanding and knowledge.
It's also completely unfixable because the solutions you propose (which are obvious) don't scale.
To understand this you only have to look at education through history. A long time ago college education was for a very tiny (well connected) section of society. Conceptually think of it as the aristocracy keeping themselves on top. Teaching staff ratio is high - small classes, lots of attention.
Naturally education slowly opens to the masses. (GI Bill etc). So now there's a scaling problem. Much lower staff ratio, and a need to improve productivity. Think multiple choice, not essays. Lecturers don't know the names (never mind abilities) of Individual students.
Your suggestion is both good, but impractical. There aren't enough people qualified to teach the way you have in mind, and even if there were the student could not afford them.
We can offer a college education for the masses, we can give every college student an indepth real "education", but we can't do both.
Although interestingly the _student_ who approaches a course with zeal, and engages teachers in every possible opportunity, will get the most out of the experience. In other words today the quality of the education rests on the student, not the teacher.
