Should Universities Focus More on Practical Skills Than Exams? What I Learned From My Son’s First Year
It was 10:47 on a Tuesday night in October when Liam pushed his macroeconomics flashcards across our kitchen table and stared at the ceiling. His half-drunk iced matcha was sweating into the free placemat we picked up at the grocery store, and granola crumbs from his after-class snack dotted the edges of the stack. His laptop was split between two tabs: a Quizlet with 217 terms for his midterm, and a messy Google Sheet tracking seasonal inventory for the tiny native plant shop his first-year business group was consulting for.
“I can’t remember what frictional unemployment is,” he said. “But I just spent three hours fixing Ms. Rita’s reorder formula, and she texted me ten minutes ago asking if I want a part-time operations job when I graduate. Which one of these is actually supposed to matter?”
I work as a high school college and career advisor, so I hear versions of that question every week, from panicking 17-year-olds and their parents sitting across from my desk. Most families come in asking which programs have the highest job placement rates, which dorms have the best dining, which majors will still be hiring in four years. Few think to ask how grades are broken down, or how much of the work is done for real people outside the classroom, instead of for a professor’s red pen.
That night, Liam and I pulled a paper napkin from the takeout bag on the counter and did the quick, unglamorous math he’d been too stressed to work through on his own. The multiple-choice midterm counted for 25% of his final macro grade, which worked out to roughly 3% of his first-year cumulative GPA. The plant shop project counted for 40% of his first-year business seminar grade, and came with a contact who could speak to his work on inventory management, client communication, and problem-solving for every job or internship he applied to for the next two years. He didn’t skip studying entirely. He just closed the Quizlet at 1 a.m. instead of pulling the all-nighter he’d planned. He walked away with a B- on the midterm. His group got an A on the project, and Ms. Rita rolled out their new checkout layout and pre-potted plant bundle idea last month; weekend sales are up 18% so far.
I’ve heard plenty of arguments for keeping exams heavy in the curriculum, and I don’t think they’re all wrong. When I got my teaching degree 18 years ago, I complained nonstop about the closed-book state licensing exam I had to pass to graduate. I spent weeks memorizing de-escalation steps, allergy response protocols, and legal reporting requirements I was sure I could just look up if I ever needed them. Two years later, a student had an allergic reaction in my office, and I walked through every step of administering her EpiPen without pausing to pull up a note. Some knowledge does need to live in your head, ready when you don’t have time to search. Timed exams can test that baseline, and they can also teach students to perform under pressure, a skill that comes up in everything from job interviews to emergency work.
But that’s not what most undergraduate exams test these days. Last semester, one of my former advisees, a mechanical engineering major, called me during her midterm week, crying because she’d spent 36 hours straight building a working prototype of a low-cost wheelchair ramp for local disabled residents, and only had two hours to study for her statics final. She mixed up two formulas on the closed-book test and got a C. She landed a paid summer internship with a civil engineering firm off that prototype. The formulas she mixed up? She looks them up in a reference guide every single time she uses them on the job, per company policy.
For families starting to tour college programs, I now tell them to skip the generic questions about “hands-on learning” that every admissions department has a scripted answer for. Ask your tour guide, who’s usually just a sophomore getting $15 an hour to walk backward, two specific questions: What percentage of first-year core class grades come from timed, closed-book exams? And how many first or second-year projects require working with a client or organization outside the university? Most students will give you a straight answer, even if the tour brochure won’t. Liam asked a version of that on his tour, but he was 18 and distracted by the dorm with the late-night pizza place, so he didn’t register the answer when his guide said most first-year grades were 70 to 80% exam-based.
For parents whose kids are already in school, the smallest shift I’ve seen work is changing one question in your weekly check-in. Instead of leading with “how are your grades?” ask, “What’s one problem you worked through this week that you couldn’t solve at first?” I started asking Liam that after that October midterm, and that’s how I heard about the inventory mess, the miscommunication with his group member who missed three meetings, and the negotiation he did with Ms. Rita to adjust their project scope when she asked for more work than they’d originally agreed to. None of that shows up on a multiple-choice score, but all of it is the stuff employers actually ask about in interviews.
Professors don’t have to rewrite their entire curriculum to shift the balance, either. One of Liam’s macro professors swapped half the multiple-choice questions on his most recent midterm for one open-book, 45-minute scenario: downtown has three empty storefronts and 12 recent graduates looking for work, what type of unemployment is this, and what two small policy changes would you suggest, and why? Liam says he still remembers the difference between frictional and structural unemployment three months later, because he had to use it to answer a question that felt real, not just match a term to a definition.
Last week I sat on the couch folding socks while Liam worked on summer internship applications. His resume doesn’t list his midterm scores, or even his GPA unless an application specifically asks for it. It leads with the plant shop project, the social media content calendar he built for Ms. Rita, and her name and contact info as a reference. None of the eight applications he’s submitted so far have asked for a copy of his transcript.
We still don’t have a perfect answer to the question he asked across the kitchen table that night. If he decides to apply for a competitive MBA program three years from now, that B- might nudge his GPA just enough to make a difference. Fields like nursing, civil engineering, and K-12 teaching still rely on closed-board licensing exams for good reason, and no one is suggesting those go away. But the balance still feels off for most programs, weighted toward a model of learning built when information wasn’t available in every student’s pocket, and most employers hired based on transcripts instead of work samples.
Last week Liam came home for Sunday dinner and mentioned his business seminar professor is adding a second client project for next year’s first-years, and cutting one of the two multiple-choice midterms. It’s a small shift. It doesn’t fix the whole system. But it’s a start.
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