Do exams take away crucial knowledge needed....

[NumberSix]

Being able to teach yourself is a valuable skill. Especially with all the rapid technological changes, and their effects on society. Which is better a motivated person who searches out the needed information, and learns it on their own, or a person who sits in class and is spoon fed?

[sanantone]

Who gets used to it? The 26% that make it through. (86% of all high school graduates START college. 26% will graduate) Who goes to grad school? 13%. Have only 13% of the Americans "learned" English?
When did you last send a business letter in APA or MLA? Puh-leeze.
I've always stood in the same arena, college is a credential. Jump through the hoops to get the piece of paper. If you can avoid crap, do so. If you can avoid spending extra money, do so. If you can avoid dealing with teachers, do so. I promise you, bullpoo like punitive teaching absolutely 100% causes students to drop classes. The resilient 26% are just the people that have figured it out and are doing it anyway. I don't think learning is EVER part of it.

Actually, there is what's considered proper formatting and etiquette for business correspondence. That's why colleges have business writing courses. People in clerical jobs need to know how to properly format documents and most of them don't need a degree. Paralegals need to know how to format legal documents and they don't need a degree either. When I worked in security, we had to properly format our daily activity and incident reports because they could one day end up in a courtroom and they were also reviewed by the client. Security officers definitely don't need a college degree. Unfortunately, most people in security neither write well nor know how to follow directions which made my job as a supervisor that more difficult. Police officers learn proper report writing which goes beyond content and most police departments require an associates degree or less.

There is proper formatting for personal letters which is probably becoming a lost art with the advent of texting and email, but properly formatting business emails is important. We have to properly format addresses on envelopes when we send mail. There are variations for how one can write up a cover letter, thank you letter after an interview, CVs, and resumes. However, there are plenty of standard rules for those too. There are even unofficial rules for how one is supposed to post on the internet such as not writing in all caps, not choosing bright colors that are hard to read, and splitting up long posts into paragraphs. I'm not even getting into the formatting that should be done for spreadsheets, PowerPoint Presentations, and Access databases that make life easier. So, yes, we have to get used to following directions when it comes to formatting documents. Sorry

[mrs.b]

I'm good at reading people, and I always connect with my teachers. I know how teachers think. This is the case with all "good grade students" and it has nothing to do with learning the material. I read a syllabus, I know exactly where to put my effort, and I write well enough to meet the expectations of my teachers. I never miss an assignment and I never turn them in late. You'll notice I didn't say anything about LEARNING THE SUBJECT. Schools don't necessarily measure learning the subject. Think about it for a moment. Really, how is learning a subject measured?

So, in many ways, there is a learning skill that you learn by testing that you DON'T learn in a classroom, and that's relevant to independent study. Self-driven quest for knowledge is not the same as being lectured/talked at. I've done both, and I've been a talker-teacher too. In no way do I have any idea of who is learning anything. I know who does homework. I know who comes to class. I know who can pass a test. Learning is what happens in your mind, it's personal. What you take away is on you. It's not necessary for a grade, and I've yet to encounter any evaluation situation where the teacher actually cared or measured what I LEARNED.

...

Frankly, the CLEP does exactly what you fear you're missing. Grades are never about learning, they're about compliance.

Cookderosa put it better than I ever could. I took quite a few courses, despite the usual trend recommended on this forum, because I knew I could land an A in any course easier than I could pass a Pass/Fail exam. Why? Because writing papers was always my "thing," but I do not test well.

To preserve my pride, I will not tell you exactly how many midterm or final exams I technically got a D or F on, but I will say it is more than one. Still, I got almost straight As in the courses I took because I read the syllabus and followed assignment instructions to the letter. The first thing I did when a course started was create a spreadsheet that framed out all assignment due dates and how the grade was weighted, and as I got my grades I would plug them in so I would know the minimum grade needed on actual exams to maintain an A. For one of my last courses, I was very sick when the final paper was due and I think I spent exactly two hours on a 10+ page paper. It was crap to the point that I apologized to the course mentor in the comments section when submitting, so imagine my surprise when I got a 98%. Courses skip pages and in some cases, entire chapters of the textbooks and only really require students to KNOW a few key sections from any chapter, and it is reasonably easy to gauge what those subject pieces are if any attention is paid to the instructor's comments.

On the other hand, the comprehensive exams require you to learn the material - all of it - and they pull from entire textbooks (and often more than one of them). While they will not go into depth on all the material, you do not know what sections they will delve deeply into until you're past the point of no return. You might be able to learn the bare minimum to pass, but you're risking a fail if they change up the tested material which does happen on occasion, or you get a version that does not play to your study strengths.

I think the system could be improved by adding letter grade equivalents to cut back on the bare minimum studying, but comprehensive exams are certainly not a cheat. They take less time, and they're less expensive, but I remember more from the subjects I tested out of than I do from the ones I took in $600+ 12-week courses.

[sanantone]

Writing intensive courses have mostly busy work. It's easy to bs your way through papers without reading much of the textbook.

[ryoder]

My favorite quote ever from True Blood Tara Thornton: "School is just for white people looking for other white people to read to 'em. I figured I save my money and read to myself."
Beautiful.

[cookderosa]

My favorite quote ever from True Blood Tara Thornton: "School is just for white people looking for other white people to read to 'em. I figured I save my money and read to myself."
Beautiful.

Now that's funny.

I'll piggy back on what Ms.B said, I'm a crappy test taker. I don't remember details. My CLEP scores were always in the 50's. If they changed to a letter grade system, I would have taken the CLASSES instead to preserve my GPA. For people who are good test takers and terrible writers or time managers, CLEP is the way to preserve your GPA.
I swear to you, I can watch an entire season of a show on Netflix or read an entire novel and there's a 50/50 chance that I even know the name of the main character. I just don't process details like that. I don't remember phone numbers or birthdays either. I'm a very good concept person- and I can expand or synthesize ideas well, but it took me YEARS to learn this about myself. Knowing what you're good and (and bad at) is part of finding your groove in school. I didn't know it as a kid, that's for sure. If I had to go back and sit in a bio101 class, take a closed-book exam diagramming a cell, I wouldn't get out alive. Does that mean I have not learned biology? Is biology more than cell ID? If I had TIME to marinate in the field, a few semesters of taking classes in the subject, then I'd learn it eventually, but if it wasn't my major would I even care? Would I have less of an education? So, i'm not saying Sanantone doesn't get what I mean, but format doesn't measure learning. Please understand I'm not to saying knowing how to format a letter isn't important. I'm just saying it doesn't measure learning of a subject. Ex. how I format a paper about bone marrow doesn't give you insight into my knowledge of bone marrow- see?

FWIW my my memory from childhood is pretty damn good. I can name all the federal reserve banks. :patriot:

[sanantone]

I understand what you mean. I never said that it measures learning. There are just many cases in life where you have to be able to follow directions. I'm the opposite of you. I'd rather not deal with paper writing and formatting. People have different learning styles. I am a visual-verbal learner (Colorado Tech made us take an assessment). I learn by reading. When I have to recall information, I visualize the text. Some people visualize pictures. I'm just better at remembering words. That's why my verbal scores on tests have always been much higher than my quantitative scores. I'm not bad at math; I'm just slightly above average. Math and the physical sciences require remembering methods for calculation and concepts. Physics also requires spatial intelligence...another area I don't excel in. The biological sciences come easier to me because they can be done with rote memorization. I also like studying living things. Math and the physical sciences can be so inanimate.