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Comment by vgchh | Hacker News Reader

For universities to fully crumble and education to become significantly cheaper, in addition to all the advancements that have occurred in last decade, I believe we need a credible way to certify students online. Imagine if someone sitting in Tibet or slums of Bombay could prove to Googles of the world that he/she (and not some hired help) successfully completed a highly ranked test online, it could be transformative. If online testing could vouch for a person in the same way that universities do, it could open the doors to world-class opportunities for the entire world, cheaply.

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Online tests are wide open to cheating if they aren't taken in person. Hybrids exist (take online test in a testing center, e.g. AWS certifications), but aren't all that useful for the slums of Bombay.

And in a way Google is already doing this in person with their interview process: they ask obscure questions aimed at knowlege gained in a computer science degree (or by good test preparation).

taking tests in a testing center is actually pretty viable and scales well. This is primarily how all those international students from developing countries write GRE, TOEFL and end up coming to study in the US.

Proctortrak.

It’s not a perfect solution (and I despise it), but it does resolve a lot of those issues.

I have heard from people (and read accounts from people on HN) that companies use all kinds of software that does this during remote interviews. Recording the screen, turning on the camera to watch the interviewee, etc.

I doubt the main problem is ensuring integrity, it's that it's hard to test knowledge and capabilities reliably, and that's already a hard problem regardless of where the candidate is.

Exactly. If a single test becomes important enough, it will be very heavily gamed. Conventional education avoids this somewhat, because there are so many models by which you are measured against, over a very long period of time. This makes conventional education much harder to game.

You need a system that encourages people to optimize for maximum problem solving ability, but a formal grading scheme encourages people to optimize for that instead. This is the single biggest problem with online classes and is why online degrees are not considered as highly as in-person ones.

I mean, cheating is pretty rampant even at places like Berkeley or Yale.

And then you get what you measure for: people that can pass some very specific test. Not good employees, I guess.

It would be transformational if firms would be okay with some of their team working in a different timezone. It's hard to collaborate when you can only meet in the evening for one worker, and early morning the other. I don't know if there's any logistical solution to this.

It's done on large scale: just split the projects into teams and each team can be on a time zone, so intra-team communication works well and inter-team is done as much as needed.

This is how companies have offices across the world, more and more in low cost locations. It this is what you want ...

Replace Tibet with Bolivia and the point still stands.

But colleges aren’t about testing, but educating. Taking people who can’t pass a test, and turning them into people who can.

The test is merely to help discern how good a job the schools have done.

The etymology of educating is to “lead someone out of” something - namely ignorance.

There are many more people who would buy a Princeton diploma without a Princeton education than the reverse. Universities put a lot of effort into stopping people fraudulently claiming to be graduates but ~no effort into stopping people from attending classes without paying for them.

Universities are about a combination of education and certification but the certification is overwhelmingly what people pay for.

There are a lot of people who are capable of self educating and removing ignorance from their lives, but don’t have the means to pay for the fancy universities and prove their capabilities, which is what in the end certificates do. They provide a baseline, a level playing field if you will.

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