Making fair exams can be really, really hard. Evaluation of students is sometimes difficult. In fact, I’ve mentioned in several classes that I think the quality of University education would skyrocket if grading was abandoned. Now, instead of grading, they’ve said, you need something. They’re perhaps right… but maybe not. It doesn’t exactly matter how well a doctor does on her exams throughout school — if she flunks the licensing exam, she flunks; and it doesn’t matter whether a doctor flunks every exam going through school, if he gets 100% on the licensing exam (and then goes home and forgets everything). We do need a way to ensure competence on the part of doctors, engineers, lawyers, and others upon whom we depend daily for our lives and safety.
But I don’t think exams are really the way to do it. What we need is a rational Whuffie system of some kind. Perhaps, compartmentalized Whuffie.
Whuttie? you say. If you don’t know this word, go and buy and read Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (or download and read, or listen to this podcast, or this podcast (that link’s part 1, here’s the feed). Or check out the Wikipedia entry, if you’re a lazy uncool bugger:
Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This future history book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities (and most of the luxuries) of life are free for the taking. A person’s current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net.
If you think about the way we grade students now, it’s a really, well… it’s an inefficient, unrepresentative system, no matter what we do. Some students game the system, by cheating or plagiarizing — acts that don’t permanently impact on their academic rating, but instead at worst (even in the West) involve temporary problems like expulsion, and (in my experience) in Korea routinely just results in a slap on the wrist.
Let’s set up a little comparison chart here:
| Grading & Academic Programs | Education and Learning |
|---|---|
| Is a static set of evaluative records. | Is a dynamic process. |
| Involves discrete, arbitarily compartmentalized accumulation of unrelated “knowledges |