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Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

But isn't it reasonable to require studying materials for a certain time? I mean, the goal of s course isn't to pass the exam, it is to gain knowledge on a complex matter. Spending 50 hours studying something will definitely lead to better retention and understanding than 20 hours, even if 20 hours would be enough to pass the exam.

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"Spending 50 hours studying something will definitely lead to better retention and understanding than 20 hours, even if 20 hours would be enough to pass the exam."

Actually, I'd be inclined to "citation needed" that. Brains are curious things.

Out of my personal bumhole, I'd suggest that if you want to ensure retention, you're far better off retesting frequently. A big-but-not-quite-as-big certification test up front, and monthly recertification tests that are much smaller, but still cover the entire space fairly well, strikes me as much more likely to ensure retention. One big test is too amenable to cramming, which I believe is scientifically demonstrated to work great for passing tests but causes the knowledge to disappear a few days later. Then, scrap the hour requirements entirely.

It's quite possible for a person to study for 50 or 100 or 1000 hours and not possess that knowledge, or to study for 3 hours and know it well. People learn at different rates. That's why we have exams - to measure if the person actually has the knowledge.

It sounds like you are saying that California regulators made a disastrously bad test that doesn't measure knowledge well, so therefore we should require people to click "next" for 52 hours in the hopes that knowledge enters their skulls even if we can't measure it?

Presumably, if the exam is well-designed, you can't pass it without understanding the material, which you could learn over however many hours you like. Requiring both an exam and a mandatory number of hours seems redundant.

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