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Comment by cabalamat | Hacker News Reader

If you can pass the exam without understanding the subject, the exam is badly designed.

That's true, but it puts teachers at a post-primary-school level in a real bind. It's hard or impossible to take a subject like physics or calculus (or even algebra, or English literature) and teach it from first principles in a semester or two, especially when most of the students are not very self-motivated or interested a priori in the work.

So what do you do when you have a class full of students who have already been basically failed by the system and who understand none of the foundations of your subject? If you fail them all, you're the one that is likely to get the ax, even if it's true that none of them understand your material. Most teachers resign themselves to doing their best and administering fairly traditional tests and classwork, so that hard-working students can pass even with no understanding.

You're right, which is why teachers/schools/education authorities shouldn't be setting the exams. The purpose of the exams is (or should be) as much to check that they're doing their job as it is to examine the children.

True, but in practice this isn't what happens. What usually happens is that low performing teachers (or school systems) lobby to have the standardized exam watered down.

This is a fundamental problem of agency costs. The only people who gain from having a good testing system are the high performing students, and we obviously can't put them in charge.

> What usually happens is that low performing teachers (or school systems) lobby to have the standardized exam watered down.

In Britain, where the exams have been dumbed down significantly -- see http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/gcses-are-dumbed-d... or http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/do-you-see-with-yo... -- the main driver has been the ministry of education AFAICT, & their motive seems to be to increase the level of exam passes.

Teach more slowly. If I could, as a student, take courses that were "as long as necessary" rather than limited to a semester schedule, I believe I would be a lot more satisfied with my education thus-far.

If you're anything like me, you'd also have graduated at around 30.

I don't see any point in graduation, really. Why stop learning? The ideal school curriculum, in my mind, would have four unassisted co-op terms (i.e. two years of real, normal work) followed by one or two terms of instruction, repeated in a cycle, for as long as you may live. At no point would you be handed a certificate and kicked out of the building; you'd just keep coming back and learning more stuff (presumably in a myriad of unrelated subjects), then going back out and making use of it.

Sometimes you really understand something only in retrospective -- and after you learn a lot more.

Your understanding of basic science improves significantly when you see 'how things fit' in a much larger framework.

Moreover, as your studies progress (sometimes much after the exam) you see new applications of what you have learned. And this sheds new light on the subject and you get deeper understanding of the subject.

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