Honestly, these kind of multiple choice tests just suck, and OP shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t take this stuff serious.
Multiple choice quizzes are also useful to the student because they provide a snapshot of fact memorization and maybe some application but there is no point in counting the grades, IMO.
If we must evaluate students, then we should be treating evaluation as important as imparting knowledge and experience and spend the time on it that it deserves. Students deserve and need timely and thoughtful individual feedback in order to improve anyway. That means thoughtful projects and a lot of time spent grading. How you incentivize this amongst educators who often don’t even want to be teaching is beyond my pay grade.
(Additionally, a grade should reflect level of mastery at the end of the course regardless of progression but that’s not how grades are generally calculated.)
Instead of making class Dog extend class Animal for the whole semester, I found myself learning how to do polygon collision detection, optimize it with a rectangle intersection pre-test, modeling thrust and inertia, etc. I started adding level-ups like extra lives, missiles, procedurally generating increasing difficult levels.
Still some of the most fun I remember having with a computer.
In your particular case, I'm glad you had a good professor that allowed you to spend otherwise wasted time learning. However, I can't help but feel you should never have been forced to take (and presumably pay for) that class.
I felt the same way, so I dropped out of school and started looking for someone who would hire me without a degree. I regret not having a university experience, but as far as career goes, I got a two year head start and no debt.
I expect this is hyperbole, but the sense that degrees have softened their content density is palpable.
Even when I was attending, decades ago, the administration at my university was conjuring plans to greatly diminish the breadth and depth of content in their courses in order to graduate more students.
-There usually isn't a prep course available, nor are there other prerequisites.
-When there is a prep course, it is usually called remedial as if being failed in high school, being an older student who left high school years ago, or just never being exposed to a subject makes you, as a person, deficient. (And, of course, these legally have to be included in a person's transcript.)
-Universities are under pressure to push people through quickly, so they don't want students taking extra prep courses early on.
-Universities/parents/students all want to see good grades and frequently prioritize this over education (which is probably the fundamental problem of education: how to evaluate and what to do with those evaluations)
-There are no ways, difficult ways, or arbitrary ways to drop out of an intro course.
-A syllabus is fundamentally a contract, but you (usually) don't get to see it until you have registered, paid, and been to the course. ... etc.
In my degree, object oriented programming came in later semesters, often paired with courses on symbolic computing, discrete mathematics, and computability and complexity.
In any case, you've shifted the goal posts from:
> the sense that degrees have softened their content density is palpable.
Having low level content come later isn't "softened content density".
This works because it's closer to a real work environment, where you'll have a manager who's at least somewhat aware (or should be) of how much each person is accomplishing. The whole, "just let the group figure it out" process that is so common in schools doesn't work, because there's no one with manager-level awareness and authority.