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I think many of us would agree that job interviews (in tech at least) are horribly broken, because they don't do a good job of testing candidates' ability to do the actual work they'll be doing day-to-day. So saying exams are like job interviews is not a positive for exams. And, for most people, the ideal is to find a job and stick with it for years, so it's not like job interviews are common, everyday occurrences.

For presentations, usually you spend a lot of time preparing for them (similar to exams), building a slide deck or pages of notes that you refer to while giving the talk (not similar to exams). Sure, you do have to be able to think on your feet, but I don't think the comparison to a sit-down exam is all that apt.

For mundane work tasks, you have the internet and whatever reference materials you want (including LLMs, these days); this sort of thing is so different from a sit-down exam that it's almost comical that you'd try to equate the two.

I'm not saying I know of a better way to evaluate learning than proctored, in-person exams, but suggesting that sort of situation is particularly relevant to real life... no, no way.

Having been both a data analyst and software engineer I agree. The data analyst one? Here is 50K of Excel rows with all kinds of weirdness in it, you're data analyst right? You have 4 hours to analyze this data. Go!

The software engineer one: here is a takehome assignment. One week later: finished!

To be fair, they both represented pretty well what work I'm going to do. The data analyst didn't show that well how much I'd also be data engineering, but whatever, I was a SWE before having a DA stint. Back to SWE again though.

>you don't care if your doctor needs to look up the specific interactions of your various meds. You do care if you see them googling 'what is an appendix'.

Sounds like you're saying that it's acceptable to be a little foggy about the limits of your knowledge, as long as you remember the core foundations. For a first year medicine student, the edge of their knowledge will include things that are the core foundation of a practicing doctor. Why should such a student be tested as if he already had several years of familiarity with the subject when this is all relatively new material to him?

I don’t completely disagree with this and I do appreciate the well thought out response. I should say that most of my recent relevant experience was as a grad student teaching assistant so I’m neither just somebody grouching that I didn’t like taking exams, nor somebody with deep experience setting the things up. Some respectful quibbles, then, since I gather you have more direct experience than me.

> Proctored, in-person exams are the only reliable mechanism we have for ascertaining if a specific individual has mastered key fundamentals and can answer relevant questions about them in a relatively timely fashion. Everything else is details and thresholds - how fast do you need to be able to recall, how deep, what details are fundamental.

I don’t think this is how people actually engage with exams. I had a lot of folks in office hours who treat the exam as the ceiling of their competence, rather than the floor, and do things like cram or try to figure out exactly what topics will be on the test to study just those. If the goal is to establish a 100% solid foundation for things you have to know to be a professional (which I think is a great goal), I prefer something like Mastery Learning to the conventional exam process. (Maybe we could call Mastery Learning conventional exams a different set of thresholds, unusual thresholds if we want to look at it that way).

> From there, I think it's fine to hate poorly made exams, and it's a given that many folks making exams have no idea what they're doing (or don't have the resources to do it right). But the premise of an exam is not completely divorced from reality.

I worked with some professors who I thought gave good exams, some who gave less good ones, so I don’t think the premise is completely divorced from reality. But it seems more like something the good instructors overcame, rather than a construct that is really helpful.