When the whole thing is an exercise in competitive pedigreeing, of course it's going to be gamed. If it were more about human development, we'd be focusing on the deltas instead, and they'd be harder to fudge.
We (students) all hated those teachers who wasted our time with things that wouldn't help us get further in the job pipeline. I'd like a little more gamification, because I'm in college and still dealing with too many profs who teach less and less about what people need to do their jobs and more and more stuff no one asked for.
There doesn't have to be an immediate connection between what a teacher says and the subject they are supposed to teach. Many fantastic teachers have inspired me and made me who I am by giving little pieces of unrelated advice. But the advice of a teacher is really, well, just the advice of some teacher. They aren't gods. Plenty of them give really bad advice. I just care about students learning to learn and developing critical thinking. Students can read literature for opinions on things unrelated to school subjects, and ponder on their own. They can watch movies, listen to songs, google things, or even talk to other students. But I don't think teachers should go even further out of class discussions than they already do.
Just pretend to care while they're rattling on about their kids and their sex lives, meticulously regurgitate their opinions--verbatim--on the test, and watch the circle of life remain unbroken as one generation of over-credentialed under-performers passes the torch to the next.
I mean, hell, it's only four years of your life. Who's going to miss that?
However, many of the things that you are being taught (at least I hope this is still the case) that don't appear to be needed for the "job" are actually important because they are needed for the understanding of the background for why and how the "job". The failure of teachers that we faced as students was that the reasons for learning something were often not explained and only became obvious when learning about other subjects in later years. Having the relevance of the knowledge explained to us would have made it easier for us to learn.
One of my favourite examples was the subject of Karnaugh maps (or K-maps) which is used in logic circuit minimisation for small circuits. We learned all about and didn't use it again for the rest of my engineering undergraduate days.
However, a number of years working with a colleague on trying to solve a particularly pernicious software problem, I asked him why he hadn't used the concept of "don't cares" in short-circuiting the logic mess that was required to solve the software dilemma we were facing. He had never heard of the concept as he had never been taught about K-maps in his undergraduate programming course.
One he understood the concept and it didn't take him long, he was able to write 5 lines that solved the problem, instead of the hundred's that he had already had written (with many more to follow) to test for the problem throughout the program.
I have been surprised at how often over the years, where theoretical knowledge or other knowledge has come to the rescue in finding a solution for specific real-world problems, even though it has (on the surface) no relevance to the job at hand.
I have worked with some very smart people over the years (much smarter than me) who have been stuck for a solution because they didn't have that "irrelevant" piece of knowledge from their undergraduate days, but I did and so a problem was solved.
The one piece of advice I will give you is to learn as widely as you can so that you basic knowledge base will be broad enough for you to keep adding to as the years go by.
We need to humanize our education systems. The concept that we all sit around in school for 20+ years and then go out and find something to do with all of that knowledge is based more on maintaining rigid financial/power structures than it is based on effective information discovery and utilization, and there's no reason that a useful piece of information recovered partially-intact from the caverns of memory here or there should continue to justify such a lumbering, monolithic system.
There are no guarantees that the system will provide even what you've enjoyed; as you said, a peer with similar education had either not been taught or had not remembered the needed concept.
Humans need it "on-demand". We learn and master a trade experimentally, most naturally in the context of an apprenticeship. We can't compartmentalize book learning and practical employment, putting years-long gaps between them, and expect the eviction algorithm in peoples' brains to have not pruned much of the relevant information. We need it cemented with immediate, meaningful, recurring experience, and we need systems that will make it easy for us to remember and reference as necessary.
The existing educational apparatus is none of this. It is just a cash cow for the banks and universities, enslaving most of its "graduates" to decades of debt servicing. That, IMO, is the primary reason it continues to be enforced, because there is very little that is rational about it.
I believe you're correct about young people being turned into debt slaves. The rich and rich-aspirational in the UK are encouraging/implementing this here as quickly as they are able.
That's why I don't think teachers ought to be in charge of teaching those extra things like K-maps, but rather, students should be asked to study things on their own (both inside and outside their comfort zone), in hopes that students will "learn to learn" and be able to teach themselves.
You're right, this method would not have given you K-maps in school, but it also would have wasted less of your time in school, and empowered you to learn about things on your own (such as don't cares in K-maps, or even just the general idea that you can assign whatever value you like to outputs you never expect to see).
Better people will deal with what comes their way. Maybe today it's a job, but tomorrow it'll be something else.
Students who were only thought how to build software, will have a hard time dealing with life when robots starts building software instead of them.
First have better people, then let better people be better and bring themselves to prosperity.
These are also skills that are hard to teach as a specific subject; they mostly come with experience in some other, more practical subject. Some of these, like critical thinking, can go against the modern prevailing religion (political correctness), which makes teaching them harder still.
Must really appreciate the lack of affordable health care and never being able to afford a family. But at least you can appreciate it!
That, and "human development" in terms of an actual broad education will probably get you further in the long run than circling up around the latest job credential.
I remember reading somewhere about how learning certain instruments makes changes to the brain's surface that are large enough to see with the naked eye. From many accounts, playing the violin was no small part of Einstein's life and research. Who knows if he'd have been as productive if he'd just been all-physics-all-the-time? It could have served as a sort of "backpropagation" to his theoretical work.
From my own experience, many of these seemingly unrelated intellectual pursuits open so many doors, and from this article it isn't just my own experience: https://medium.com/personal-growth/einsteins-violin-the-hidd...
You've never been poor I see, or really truly known anyone who was. Poverty is a real problem, here, in the good old USA still. Survival is all many people worry about. I'm relaying a reality to you that you clearly have no concept of. I didn't have indoor plumbing until I was a teenager. We lived off government handouts and what we could kill and bathed outdoors in rainwater we had to strain the misquote larvae out of with a towel. Don't tell me I'm being overly dramatic, you don't know what you're talking about.
Yea, music is good, but when you're worried about how you're going to eat today you don't think about such things, you don't plan long term, you live day by day.
Despite whatever hardships you have endured, here you are.
That's correct, yes, but it's not the whole story.
(Some of) us students hold the same opinions, regardless of whether or not our parents do.
Indeed, I would gladly shed any of the "good person" parts of my personality, if doing so gave me better aptitude in the field that I'm studying.
(Sadly, genetic engineering is still a pipe dream, and won't work on already-living humans anyway.)
There is a world of difference between being educated and getting an education.
If you were scored based on delta, gaming it would be laughably easy. Just completely fail your first exam, and then steadily "improve" to your real skill level. That's basically incentivizing students to do what Intel does with processors :)
I'm not talking about getting graded USDA Prime so I can fetch the best price in the meat case. I'm talking about personal development. When you go to a personal trainer, you're not going to fudge your delta because you can't fudge your delta--the degree is your body, and everyone will know if you passed or failed.
And grading in absolute values is still more useful to asses your performance than deltas anyway: "you can lift X kg today" is more useful than "you can lift 2 kg more today"?
If we keep with the lifting analogy, I know a lot of guys who could lift some serious weights in high school--but with terrible form. Ten years later they're all messed up with joint and muscle problems due to bad training. They've dropped out of the fitness lifestyle, and aren't about to recommend their HS football coach for anything.
But then you look at guys like Arnold or Scooby who've maintained a high level of fitness throughout their lives without a debilitating injury, people tend to take them more seriously. Of course, then we're talking more about integrals--which would be even harder to fudge than deltas.
I think the worst part of the whole sorry situation is that our modern economy is becoming so detached from reality that the credential has more value than actual performance. I've seen so many nutritionists who are fat and tired and will probably not live that long, but they bought a certification from state U, so now they have a job and people listen to them. Or hairdressers! So many can't even give a decent haircut or keep their tools clean, but they got their state cert, so they can go out and charge for haircuts while mom can't. Or even people with 4.0 GPAs and a masters in CS. I can't tell you how many of those I've had to let go because a high schooler ran circles around them.
Computing is one of the few fields, like music or acting, where you can still just go out there, perform, and get paid for it. I wonder how long that will remain the case...