Should Universities Prioritize Practical Skills Over Exams? What I Learned From My Son’s First Internship
The crumpled performance review landed on my kitchen table at 9:17 p.m. last May, next to a half-eaten frozen pepperoni pizza and a lukewarm can of iced tea. My son Leo, two weeks into his first marketing internship after his second year of college, had just gotten his first formal check-in. He held a 3.7 GPA, aced every consumer behavior and business strategy midterm he’d taken, and could crank out a 20-page case study in three hours fueled by gas station energy drinks. His boss’s feedback? He couldn’t draft a simple client follow-up email without three rounds of edits, and he’d frozen mid-presentation when a local café owner pushed back on the social media color palette he’d spent three days building.
“I can recite the 4 Ps of marketing in my sleep,” he said, picking a congealed pepperoni off the pizza crust. “None of that told me what to say when someone says they hate all your ideas and they’re not paying for work that ‘looks like TikTok garbage.’”
When Leo was choosing schools two years earlier, we’d toured three programs across the state. The large public research university he ultimately picked sold us hard on exam-based grading. The tour guide, a sharp senior in the business program, told us 80% of first- and second-year core classes relied on multiple-choice midterms and final essays, no messy group project grades dragged down by peers who skipped class. “It’s fair,” she said. “You get out exactly what you put in studying.” The smaller regional school an hour away required alternating semesters of co-op work for all business majors, but Leo wrote it off immediately. “I don’t want half my grade dependent on some guy who never shows up to meetings,” he said. I backed him. I grew up on standardized tests and final exams, and I’d always bought the line that exams were the objective measure of learning. Practical skills, I figured, were what internships were for. Colleges teach you what to think; on-the-job training teaches you how to do it.
That myth fell apart over the 12 weeks of Leo’s internship. I drove him to work one rainy Tuesday when his car was in the shop, and he spent the 20-minute ride telling me about Mia, the other intern in his cohort, who went to that same regional school he’d turned down. Same age, same major, same 3.7-ish GPA. She’d already run two small client campaigns on her own, could pull cross-platform analytics without pausing to Google every step, and had talked an upset client down from canceling their contract when a scheduled Reel got delayed by a platform glitch. Her program rarely uses high-stakes midterms. Half the grade for every core class comes from working with actual local small businesses through the semester; quizzes and essays make up the rest, just to prove you understand the concepts behind the work. “It’s not that she’s smarter than me,” Leo said, staring out the windshield at stop-and-go traffic. “She just got to mess this up 10 times for a grade before she got here and messed it up for real money.”
I ran into Leo’s marketing department advisor at a parent reception that fall, and I asked her why the core curriculum still leaned so heavily on exams when local employers complained every year about new grads who couldn’t do entry-level tasks. Dr. Hale has taught at the school for 18 years, and she laughed into her plastic cup of white wine before she answered. She gets pushback from two sides, she said. Administration ties a chunk of program funding and accreditation to standardized exam pass rates, so departments can’t scrap tests entirely even if they want to. But the louder pushback often comes from parents. A few years back, she shifted 40% of her introductory marketing grade to a hands-on semester project with the campus bookstore, and half the parent emails she got that semester asked where the study guide was, how their kid was supposed to memorize the one right answer to an open-ended problem.
No one argues exams should disappear entirely, she said. Leo still says he’s grateful he had to memorize federal email compliance rules for his digital marketing midterm; he doesn’t have to look those up every time he drafts a campaign. Exams force students to nail down core facts, learn to perform under pressure, and give a baseline check for people who skip all the semester work. The problem is the balance: at most large public universities, exams and individual essays make up 80 to 90% of a student’s grade for the first two years, and practical, hands-on work is treated as an optional extracurricular, something you chase in an unpaid summer internship if you can afford to work for free.
That imbalance doesn’t just hurt kids who are starting their first jobs. It changes how they learn for years. Leo told me he spent most of his first two years of college studying for tests the same way he studied in high school: cram flashcards the night before, regurgitate the terms, forget 70% of it a week later. He never stopped to ask how any of it applied to the work he actually wanted to do, because no one ever asked him to do the work.
I don’t have a grand plan to overhaul university curricula, and I don’t think most parents or high school teachers do either. But over the last year, talking to Leo, his professors, and his friends’ parents, I’ve picked up small, doable things we can do long before our kids walk across a graduation stage, no matter what their university’s official rules are.
When we help high school seniors pick classes for their first semester, most of us default to checking Rate My Professor for “easy A” and clear grading rubrics. Last month, I helped Leo’s 17-year-old cousin pick her first semester business classes, and instead we looked up old syllabi posted on the department website. If more than 60% of a core class’s grade came from multiple-choice exams and a single final paper, we looked for another section, even if it met an hour earlier. She ended up in a section that weights 40% of the grade to a project with a local food bank, and she already has a draft of work she can put on a resume before she finishes her first semester.
For parents of high schoolers still grinding through AP and state-mandated exams, we don’t have to pull them out of advanced classes or quit quizzing them on flashcards to add small practical checks. When Leo was studying AP Macro senior year, I used to just quiz him on definitions of inflation and monetary policy before tests. If I had it to do over, I’d do what his 10th grade history teacher did once a month: tie every test term to one small, real task. Instead of just asking him to define supply chain bottlenecks, I’d ask him to walk through why his favorite chicken sandwich combo went up $1.50 in two years, then shoot a 10-minute email to the manager of the local location to ask what changed for them. It takes 20 minutes, it doesn’t cost anything, and it turns a list of memorized words into something he actually understands. High school teachers can do the same even with strict curriculum mandates: carve out one 45-minute period a month to swap a practice worksheet for a small, real task that uses the exact facts students have to know for the end-of-year test.
For kids already in college, the simplest check-in isn’t asking what their latest midterm grade was. Next time they’re home for break, ask them to name one thing they learned how to do that semester that they could show an employer who doesn’t care about their GPA. If they can’t name one, help them sign up for one low-lift, low-commitment option the next semester: a 1-credit micro-internship through the campus career center, a volunteer gig running social media for a local animal rescue, even a class project that partners with a local small business. It doesn’t have to be a fancy unpaid internship in a big city that costs thousands in rent. Leo picked up 5 hours a week running social media for our local regional trail association this semester, and the clips he’s built there have gotten him more positive feedback from his boss than any grade on his transcript.
The university still hasn’t changed its core business requirements. Leo still has three exam-heavy required classes left to graduate, and he still pulls all-nighters cramming for midterms some weeks. Last month, the faculty senate voted down a proposal to add a required practical work semester to the business degree, citing concerns that low-income students couldn’t afford to take time off from paid jobs to do co-ops. The argument about balance is far from over, and there’s no clear perfect answer.
Last Tuesday, he was sitting at the kitchen table again after class, answering emails between bites of leftover pasta. He hit send on a client update, leaned back, and showed me the reply that popped up 10 minutes later: “This is the clearest update I’ve gotten all year. No changes needed.”
He didn’t make a big speech about how far he’d come, or post about it online. He just closed his laptop, grabbed his jacket, and headed out the door to meet his friends. Somewhere between the flashcards and the client emails, he’s figuring out the balance on his own. Most kids do, eventually. It just would be a lot easier if their schools didn’t make them do all that catching up after graduation.
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