For example, oral exams are still very common in Poland and Polish universities. They typically takes less time to take, for a few reasons (the number of questions, the speed of writing versus oral production of answers, the ability of the professor to ask probing and follow-up questions instead of having to give the same battery of questions to each student in a blind and generic manner, even when it is clear that the student has answered the question in another answer or another way). The goal is for the professor to establish with confidence the degree to which the student understands the material.
Now, yes, it takes more time for the professor to administer the exam than it would take to administer a written exam, but note that grading exams is also very time consuming. You can delegate to grad students, but the same can be said of oral exams, so there's little differentiation there. The oral exam combines the administration of the exam with the grading, whereas written exams separate the two.
I have, yes. My university experience ran the gamut, in that I had both classes in a massive lecture hall of hundreds of students where most never spoke a word to the professor and all exams were done via scantron, as well as small graduate courses of around 4 students where the entire class was oral exams and one-on-one demonstrations and group discussions. The smallest course was only available at all because of a particularly passionate professor who insisted on holding it, and the class was never available during semesters where he wasn't available, because nobody else was willing to put in the work to personally administer the class. Notably, all those courses cost about the same amount of money per credit hour from my perspective, so the university was making orders of magnitude more money on the large class (where I can't see oral exams being feasible without significant investment) than they were making off the small class.
> You can delegate to grad students, but the same can be said of oral exams
It's much harder to delegate an oral exam than a written one. As you've mentioned, oral exams combine administration with grading, which means the grad students who are delegated to need to be able to administer the exam (ie, effectively probe the knowledge of each examinee) as well as evaluate their responses. In a written exam, the grad student only needs to evaluate the responses, usually against a set of predetermined criteria since the structure of the questions is set in stone.
None of what universities are moving towards is better, but I fail to see how it isn't cheaper.
But what if AI conducts it?
The point is that the written exam is largely outsourced to PhD students here. The professor only looks at the model solution before and the grade distribution afterwards in extreme cases. Also you can parallelize the grading so that even for 300 students the grading is done in a week. Typically the professor spends half a day otherwise it would be 2 month...
I only do oral exams for my course and I am very happy how well it works. I normally ask students to grade themselves afterwards and I am typically spot on (I have written down the grade before).
Expensive is your unsupported concern. The Greeks figured this out. Why assume this needs more expense than professor to do more than grade the performance that is carried out amongst what is some combination of peer and mentor?
Maybe a computer model is used to grade the performance. Maybe the mentor is a computer model.
the Greeks didn't have Psych 101 classes with 2000 students
People want to learn, but what they really want is a degree. No one is going to go two more years into debt for pedagogical purity
https://chem.wisc.edu/chemistry-building-project-overview/
> Chemistry, as the central science, is relevant to many other disciplines and is therefore part of the core curriculum of numerous degree programs on campus. By the time they graduate, 55 percent of undergraduates have taken a chemistry class at UW-Madison. As enrollment grew over the years, department and campus leaders noticed that students were often not able to schedule needed courses. This meant it took them longer to earn a degree.
There are about 10,000 under grads for each year at UW Madison. Chem 103 gets about 5000 students per year.
While that roughly matches the Psych 101 with 2000... this shows that "here's a real number."
Q1: Are there thousands of employers out there demanding students who have passed Psych 101 with flying colours?
Q2: If not, why not try to stop this?
I think alternatively we need employers to stop asking for degree’s altogether so the enrollees are people who are there to learn for themselves not for employers. It’d reduce the crazy demand and cost around education.
(Full disclosure: I don't understand the US college system at all [sorry!])
In what circumstances would a student be already at college and wanting/needing to "survey" psychology by doing Psych 101?
More broadly, who wants to major in psychology .. and why? Do employers need more professional psychologists?
2. “Survey” courses have 2 values through helping people learn new topics (1) gain broad understanding of the world, and (2) discover fields they may wish to major or study deeper in if they haven’t decided yet.
My caveat here is that I suspect (unsubstantiated) that some topics become filler by universities.
3. There are lots of jobs people do with a psychology major, besides a psychologist/researcher, but I don’t know how many of them require that deep knowledge explicitly.
Many jobs are probably better performed if you learn some psychology (eg a few classes worth) - marketing, non-therapeutic counseling (coaches, teaching, etc), HR, recruiting, doctors, nurses, organizational management, etc.
I want to reiterate point 1 - there’s value in education beyond employment, but it’s plausible that employers should care less. I doubt most employers expect candidates to take survey level courses, but requiring a degree of any sort implicitly assumes they have taken those courses.
OK, so what proportion of college students choose their classes for those reasons?
Thinking back to my time at college, there wasn't a whole lot of purely intellectual motivation (or genuine curiosity) going around.
The overwhelming majority were there a) to have a good time, and/or b) because they saw it as a route to a well-paying job once it was completed.
It's unfortunate because my mind becomes completely useless in those setting.
Problem solved.