University of Wisconsin to offer degrees based on tested ability

Re:University of Wisconsin to offer degrees based on tested ... by arrrg on Friday January 25, 2013 @07:33PM (#5118627)

… but the certification has to mean something or else it wouldn’t work. If the certification were meaningless (i.e. not sufficiently correlated with ability) neither people nor companies would find value in it.

Now, it may be possible to trick this sometimes or for some time, but if it would be possible consistently universities would long have become meaningless.

Ideally, companies would like to just know exactly what ability you have. However, testing for that is a long, expensive, complicated and hard task. Testing for ability is a hard problem, one you probably need specialized personal for (with knowledge of what abilities exactly you want to test for and the social science chops to make an actual worthwhile test happen). That’s one of the reasons why universities exist.

But this removedness from what companies actually want is also the reason why it’s not perfectly efficient, i.e. you sometimes have to learn stuff you don’t actually need.

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Re:University of Wisconsin to offer degrees based on tested ... by slyall on Friday January 25, 2013 @08:12PM (#5118764)

It is not as common these days but 20-30 years ago many courses had 100% of the mark depend on the Final exam. It was very common for students to do nothing for most of the year and then madly cram in the last few weeks.

All this does is make the "teaching" pary of the course optional.

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Re:University of Wisconsin to offer degrees based on tested ... by dctoedt on Friday January 25, 2013 @09:25PM (#5118953)

> 20-30 years ago many courses had 100% of the mark depend on the Final exam. It was very common for students to do nothing for most of the year and then madly cram in the last few weeks.

It's still that way in most law school classes.

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Re:University of Wisconsin to offer degrees based on tested ... by dougk16 on Saturday January 26, 2013 @12:14AM (#5119345)

This was how it was in my 4 comp sci classes when I did a semester abroad in Australia in 2003. Attendance was also completely optional, so lots of beach time was put in. Then when it was time for the exam, they put us all in a room together with no supervision. Surprisingly, everyone did very well. It was quite a joke.

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Re:University of Wisconsin to offer degrees based on tested ... by stephen_g on Saturday January 26, 2013 @05:39AM (#5119997)

What university was that? (Was it even a university? Doesn't sound like any I've heard of...)

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Re:University of Wisconsin to offer degrees based on tested ... by dougk16 on Saturday January 26, 2013 @01:07PM (#5121104)

I can't decide whether I should googleably post the name of the Uni, partly because, despite the negativity in my comment, I had a blast there. The campus was beautiful and staff and professors were very knowledgeable and helpful. I learned a lot, but unfortunately you didn't need to if you didn't want to. In fact, I seem to recall my classes were only a pass/fail basis as well, so a D was the same as an A.

It was in Cairns, which actually narrows it down quite a bit if you want to google it.

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Re:University of Wisconsin to offer degrees based on tested ... by Vivtek on Saturday January 26, 2013 @09:57AM (#5120471)

What, you've never left the United States? Continental European universities are often organized like this. Or have been recently; I can't speak for right now.

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