Do exams take away crucial knowledge needed....

[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.

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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.