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Comment by lohengramm | Hacker News Reader

One thing I always think about is to completely separate the "educational" institutes from the "certificate emitting" ones. Currently, it is the university's job to not only educate, but also to prove the student was educated (through the certificate/diploma). Wouldn't it be much more flexible if educational institutes focused only in educating, while other (unrelated) institutes focused only in testing and emitting certificates? This way, _how_ the individual learns the subject does not matter, as long as he or she is able to get certified.

This is what already happens in (at least part of) the technical certificate industry: people pay to make tests and get certified. This seems like a more intelligent approach.

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My experiences (and intuition) suggest that you'd find a cottage industry springing up to "teach the test (and nothing extra)". Combining the functions of education and certification, as conflict-of-interest as that appears, largely avoids the problem.

Any certification process for a non-trivial field is necessarily a sampling process. If you allow students to bypass the education part and they just have to pass the sampling test to gain some valuable credential, I think you'll find an industry springing up to shortcut the education process in favor of the "just barely passing the test" process.

When you say that any certification process (for a non-trivial field) necessarily becomes a sampling process, it is implied that this is already happening, i.e., there must be already a sampling process going on in the current universities. Decoupling may not solve this "problem" (if you consider this a problem), but it also does not create another one. It simply makes it more flexible so people who could not afford the education process for any reason, but were able to educate themselves by alternatives means, can also try to get certified in the level they wish. Also, the possibility of being certified by top tier certification emitters works as another motivator for people to strain and study harder (as going to top universities is not even remotely possible for most people, at least being certified by top certificate emitting institutes is probably less expensive (given the educational process is the more expensive one), and thus possible).

In other words, I believe you are right when you point that the educational institutes would narrow their focus to cover only the necessary bits to get certified, but I don't see this getting much far from what we have already; and from the point of view of the certificate emitting institute, it is desirable for the top ones to not emit certificates to anyone (in order to build a valuable brand name), having them to focus on elaborating challenging tests. Of course there may be "certificate mills", but again, this already happens, just with less flexibility.

What really picks me is that, at the end, it is all about the value people give to these certificates. Nothing would prevent society (including employers) to value more the educational process than the testing one; nothing would prevent the educational institutes to also emit certificates, thus coming back to where we are; but employers should not rely purely on certificates anyway, then I believe there is hope for the overall proposed model.

Take a typical thermodynamics course. Right now, MIT teaches a full term thermo course for mechanical engineers. The exams, including the final exam, cannot possibly test all aspects of thermo, so they sample, but they sample knowing that the students have been exposed to (via p-sets and lecture) the parts of thermo not directly tested.

Now, decouple the exam part and have someone else issue the same exact exam as the MIT profs give, but without requiring the lecture or p-set component. Now, I can imagine there would be a profitable industry player, call them the "Minimum Instructions for the Test", who might teach you only the three laws, enough math to work out a Carnot cycle problem, and the background for one energy balance problem, in other words, just enough to pass the certification exam.

The students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology will have passed the same test as the students from Minimum Instructions for the Test and yet I can have confidence in the former's ability to solve a basic on-the-job thermodynamics problem and not in the latter.

IOW, I think it is, in effect, creating a new problem by eliminating the lecture, office hours, section meetings, and problem sets aspect of the education process and focusing only on the final exam aspect. I'm really not trying to erect and eviscerate a strawman here; apologies if it seems that way, but I'm trying in this post to be very concrete about the problem I see with test-only certifications.

You are very clear. To put in abstract terms: you argue that the education process carry some value which is difficult (or even impossible) to test, making it inherently more valuable than the certification process. I can't say I completely agree with the argument, but I can understand it.

I still think that the tests, if elaborated by entities fully dedicated to them, could grow to be way more advanced than they are today. But even in the case where this growth does not happen, having separate entities dedicated to perform test-only certification could be beneficial.

By the way, if you still read this: suppose you have student A and student B. Student A attended to all classes, did exercises etc. but failed the tests. Student B missed all classes, but passed every test. Do you think student A should be certified? What about student B? Who would you hire?

Student A should not be certified.

Whether student B should be depends on the quality and thoroughness of the test, but assuming that is high, then yes.

Whether I'd hire student B, who has shown a propensity to not show up to classes, depends on why they missed them and whether I think that represents a risk in the work-world. Having someone who can pass the test but can't bother to show up to work doesn't help me very much either... ;)

Are schools significantly more efficient than universities at educating? I'd argue the opposite is true.

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