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Rote memorisation is essential. Not _all_ there is to achievement, but as you say the other parts are difficult to test.

Without memorisation ("Just google", as many comments seem to suggest), you are severely limited in what you can come up with, and how you can contribute.

If you don't have foundational knowledge (memory): 1) you don't know what to google; 2) within a discussion concepts will go over your head so you can't contribute; 3) you don't have the components to play around with and mix and match in your head to generate new ideas.

If your work is dreadfully formulaic, sure, you can probably get by with limited foundational knowledge and just searching. If your work in any way is knowledge work, then you need _knowledge_, not just access to a vast reference.

> The problem at the core is not spyware and "room checks", they are just a symptom - the question rather is how exams are designed and why schools and universities go to such drastic lengths to prevent cheating.

You got the premise wrong. The main way that students cheat in online test is by communicating with other students/tutors and by having other people take the tests for them.

Doesn't matter how perfect your exam is if the student has a friend coaching them during the exam and telling them all the answers.

And it is far more common than you think. I have been tutoring for a for 5 years and there was a massive amount of students who tried to hire me to do online exams for them during the 2 years of covid. I probably would have done it if I was still a student full of debt at that time.

I think I agree and I can't help but think that we (as a society) have our priorities backwards.

Who do these tests protect? Do they bolster the student? If so, why would they want to cheat? Is it because the information isn't relevant to their future and only the letter grade is? If a student cheats and then never encounters the natural consequences (like getting the same subject matter wrong on the job) - what was the point of the test?

The pessimist in me thinks that we're protecting industries. I would guess that an industry wants a plethora of candidates that meet a specific bar to choose from, and the information the students must memorize is inconsequential for the most part.

The point of tests in higher education is for the student to get an assessment of where they are. The whole design kind of assumes that students want to learn, not just get a piece of paper.

But that's the entirety of the higher education experience. It's all about presenting opportunities to learn and grow. People who treat it as mere credentialism are missing about 99% of the point. And yes, that includes a lot of faculty, students, and people pressuring students (to go either direction, really.)

I don't see a problem with tests. I see a problem with people treating degrees as some sort of magic totem.

this has been my experience with college too... just a waste of time to satisfy the bureaucrats. They think that winning a silly exam proves anything but your willingness to waste your time memorizing answers.

> Most tests are essentially nothing more than tests for the ability of rote memorization

This a hundred times. If I had to hire someone for a job, I would rather hire someone who knows how to search online the answer to a problem than the one who repeats the book word for word without knowing what he/she is talking about.

Exams are crap like that because better exams would require the use of one professor asking non trivial questions for each student, which costs money.

> If I had to hire someone for a job, I would rather hire someone who knows how to search online the answer to a problem than the one who repeats the book word for word without knowing what he/she is talking about.

Do you have hiring authority or have you ever had it?

How do the candidates know _what_ to search? That's memorisation.

How do you get creativity, how are candidates better able to combine idea together? By forming each idea into a memory 'chunk' that can be handled as a single concept, and then working to combine these chunks.

If you hire people who can search google, then you get people who can search what is easily searchable, and who can create what has been previously posted online. If they somehow have 'internal' knowledge and capability, that's memory.

I used the wrong terms to describe skills like creativity and problem solving beside pure superficial knowledge. Of course I wouldn't hire anyone who can only search Google.

are any of these criticims backed by evidence? Rote memorization is one of the, if not the most important backbone of excellence in any discipline. Pianists play scales, chess players memorize and repeat, athletes do the same, virtually any excellent programmer I've met shares one trait, they program a lot.

frontal teaching to large audiences isn't dehumanizing, it's simply effective reflected empirically by the large amounts of excellent graduates coming out of countries that focus heavily on that style of teaching.

I've never met a world class mathematician coming from a hippie waldorf school, I've met plenty coming out of the Soviet education system.

> Pianists play scales, chess players memorize and repeat, athletes do the same, virtually any excellent programmer I've met shares one trait, they program a lot.

They practice applying the knowledge.

> frontal teaching to large audiences isn't dehumanizing, it's simply effective reflected empirically by the large amounts of excellent graduates coming out of countries that focus heavily on that style of teaching.

LOL have you ever had the fortune of dealing with these "excellent graduates" in offshoring projects? As soon as you go one tiny step beyond what they were taught in "university" shit gets nasty. Applying abstract knowledge to a specific use case is what is important in IT, and those who never had to actually understand the topic fail miserably.

Almost all knowledge is tacit, there's no clear line between applying and learning, it's a feedback loop. In fact obsession with abstract knowledge has always been weird to me. How far does reading about swimming get you?

The offshoring thing is literally just about that. The nastiness and cultural mismatch of that industry. The huge Chinese and Indian domestic tech industries show that they can build successful things, just not necessarily for foreign markets.