But that's not a counterargument. Your simply restating your own point, which I disagree with. It's pretty obvious that someone who would score well in an artificial testing environment A would score well in such an environment B if B is a followup of A. That doesn't disprove the point that grades are a fundamentally flawed concept in education.

>My personal experience is that tests are an effective method of determining who should proceed and who should not.

Again, based on what? Conformance to a completely artificial testing environment? Again, tests have nothing to do with reality and are a flawed concept. If anything, they show if you can work under an extreme time constraint with limited resources available. Are we really basing success or failure in all of our education on this limited and arguably pretty unimportant skill-set?

>Lectures do work. They have been working for hundreds of years. This isn't an appeal to tradition. This is a statement about evidence that they work.

You're still ignoring the context, and that is that we have a better alternative to physical lectures now. Let me present an analogy:

"Books work. They have been working for hundreds of years. This is a factual statement about evidence that they work."

While principally true, that doesn't change the fact that printed letters on dead trees are no longer a viable model of distributing knowledge. It's an appeal to tradition because you ignore the context at hand. Your only argument is "we've always done it that way, therefore it must be right, why change it?".

>Lectures work so effectively that people want to put them online so anyone can watch them.

What are you trying to argue with this? Yes, online lectures are better than traditional lectures. To extend on the book analogy, while it's fundamentally still the same as reading a physical book (you're parsing words), an electronic representation of text is in every way superior to a printed book. The same holds true for online lectures.

>They won't sit through a 20 minute lecture on how to solve quadratic equations. (Except a core group of good students.)

Let me present you with my anecdotal experience as a student myself: Next to no one but a core group of good students will sit through any physical lecture unless it's absolutely mandatory to attend, either. As I've put it in another comment, if you're not at the university because you want to learn, what the fuck are you doing at the university?

The main problem with his argument is not that the "testing environment" is flawed. He is talking about learning as if it were a race, and suggesting that only the hares should be allowed to run it.

Often those who do extremely well in math classes have a pretty good head start, due to circumstances that are not a result of their abilities, or even their own choices. And, of course, such students will do better later; they can maintain a more comfortable pace than those who are racing behind b/c they are trying to make up for their late start.

It also disfavors those who are distracted not by parties and social scenes, but distracted from the main course by branches of the subject under study which catch their interest. That is, it favors the compliant student who is after good grades, and disfavors those who desire knowledge, skill and understanding for their own sake, or for any purpose not foreseen by those who designed the "course".

The great benefit to these on-line study programs is that it serves the interests of all of these kinds of students. Neither necessity, influence, affluence nor preference need induce the educators to favor one over the others.

I can give them a test and when they get an 'F' on it there is no argument. The test is a good measure of who knows the subject and who doesn't. For the most part. It's the most effective tool that I know of.

The absolutely mandatory part is the crux of the issue with regard to face-to-face classes. It forces students to meet at a set time and work on a given topic. In the absence of this forcing mechanism human nature takes over and most students fail miserably at the time management aspect of online classes. This is all anecdotal though. I don't have any research to back this up.

But does this have to be the case? In the current educational environment, I would agree that a number of students benefit from being made to attend class. The question is if this is just a result of human nature, or something else. Where that something else could be having students go to college when they are not ready for it, or high schools and earlier killing students intrinsic desire to learn, or some other reason.

Really? I give non-compulsory lectures, and get > 80% attendance rates. I also encourage audience participation, and get it. I think my lectures would be less useful via the internet. Not useless of course, but not as useful.