Should Universities Focus More on Practical Skills Than Exams? A Parent’s View From Co-op Season
It was 9:50 on a Tuesday night when my son Leo pushed his laptop away and said, “I can tell you four theories of motivation, but I cannot get a grown man named Gary to answer a Slack message.”
On one screen, he had flashcards for his organizational behavior exam. On the other, he had a blank meeting agenda for his co-op placement. His manager had asked him to run a short project check-in the next afternoon. The exam would ask him to label stages of group development. The meeting would require him to keep Gary on topic, confirm two deadlines, and leave with a written list of action items.
Leo is twenty, in his second year of business, and a strong exam student. For most of his education, knowing the material has meant being able to recall it quickly, usually alone, usually under timed conditions. This term, the gap between that skill and ordinary working life has become impossible to ignore.
Earlier in the semester, he was asked to summarize a customer survey. He had passed a statistics test on means, sample sizes, and confidence intervals. But the real spreadsheet had duplicate entries, missing postal codes, and open-ended answers that did not fit neatly into a chart. He spent almost six hours trying to make the data look like the clean examples from his lecture.
“Why didn’t they teach us this?” he asked, holding up a bag of pretzels like evidence.
“They did teach you some of it,” I said. “They just didn’t make you clean up the mess first.”
That, to me, is the heart of the debate over exams versus practical skills. The question is not whether exams are useless. They are not. A timed exam can show that a student understands basic accounting rules, can calculate a medication dose, or can explain how a cell produces energy. In some fields, that kind of tested knowledge protects people from serious mistakes. Exams also give every student roughly the same task under similar conditions, which matters when grades carry so much weight.
The problem is that exams have become the default way of proving learning in too many courses, even when the work itself looks nothing like an exam. Real problems are open-book. They involve other people. Information is incomplete. Deadlines shift. A teammate disappears. A client changes direction. A dataset contains errors. Students can graduate with high grades and still not know how to write a useful email, run a meeting, interpret a messy result, or disagree with someone without making the situation personal.
Leo learned this through a group project. One teammate, Priya, missed two deadlines. Leo did what many polite high-achieving students do: he quietly did more of her work. When I asked why he had not messaged her sooner, he said, “I didn’t want to seem rude.”
I did not tell him to “communicate better.” That kind of advice floats above the actual problem. Instead, I asked him what he would want a manager to say to him if he were the one falling behind. He typed, “Hey, are you okay?”
“That’s kind,” I said, “but it doesn’t give her a next step.”
He revised it to: “I haven’t received the competitor section yet. Can you share whatever you have by six, or should Dana and I split it?”
Priya wrote back within twenty minutes. She had been sick and had not told the group. She sent partial notes, and the team redistributed the work. The project still got a B+, and Leo remained annoyed about the grade. But he had practiced a more useful skill: naming a problem in writing, acknowledging the person, and proposing a concrete choice.
Universities could teach these moments directly without turning every course into a job-training session. A statistics class could include one assignment where students clean a flawed dataset and explain what they changed. A marketing class could require a short client brief, not only a multiple-choice test on consumer theory. A history seminar could ask students to turn an essay argument into a two-page briefing for a local museum. Group projects could include short individual notes describing what each student did, where disagreement happened, and what they would change next time.
These do not have to be elaborate additions. In many cases, instructors can shift a small percentage of marks from a final exam to a practical task. Students still learn the theory, but they also learn what the theory is for.
Parents and teachers can help with this shift at home, especially during exam season. When Leo is deep in flashcards, I sometimes ask, “What can you actually do after passing this course?” It sounds simple, but it forces him to connect memorization to application. Another useful question is, “If someone paid you to use this tomorrow, what would they ask you to do?”
If he is stuck on a team issue, I offer sentence starters rather than solving it for him:
“I’m looking at the rubric, and I’m not sure this section fits.”
“Here’s where I’m stuck. What do you think?”
“Can we decide by four so I can finish my part?”
“I disagree because the data says something different. Can we look at it together?”
These phrases are small, but they give students a way into conversations they have never been taught to have. I will also review an email draft, but only for two things: Is the main request clear? Is there a deadline? I try not to polish every sentence, because then the email becomes mine and not his.
Practical competence also includes ordinary systems. Leo now uses file names like “Smith_Report_Draft_v2” instead of “final_final_real_final.” His meeting agendas include a desired outcome, three discussion items, and space for action items. Status updates use green, yellow, and red. None of this is glamorous, but it is the kind of thing that makes early workplaces less shocking.
None of this means exams should disappear. Leo admitted after his organizational behavior exam that memorizing the theories had given him a language for what he was seeing in his co-op meeting. Gary did talk too much. Two people did argue over responsibilities. But Leo recognized the patterns, and because he had prepared an agenda, he was able to say, “Let’s park that and decide the two items we came here for.”
The meeting was not smooth. Gary went off topic twice. One deadline remained unresolved until the following morning. Leo came home, reheated noodles, and said, “It was fine. We at least left with decisions.”
That is the realistic version of success, not a polished speech about the future of education. Leo still checks his exam grades first and measures himself by them. His transcript still mostly reflects tests and essays. Universities are slowly adding co-ops, simulations, open-book cases, and community projects, but change is uneven and slow.
At home, we keep asking the same quieter question: what should a student be able to do with what they have learned? Sometimes Leo rolls his eyes. Sometimes he asks me to read an email before he sends it. The exams still matter, but they no longer get to be the whole story.
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