Should Universities Focus More on Practical Skills Than Exams? A Parent and Teacher’s Balanced View
It was 9:47 on a Sunday when my daughter Maya pushed her biology flashcards across the kitchen table and said, “I’m going to fail at being an adult.”
Her laptop showed 147 lecture slides on cell processes. Half a mug of tea had gone cold beside a granola bar wrapper. Her phone, face-up, displayed an email from her summer internship coordinator: Could she organize a spreadsheet of survey responses and draft a short note to participants?
Maya could recite the stages of mitosis. She could tell me the difference between osmosis and diffusion in a sentence that would probably earn full marks. But the spreadsheet had twelve columns, duplicate email addresses, and no answer choices.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said.
I almost took the laptop. That is the parental instinct, isn’t it? Fix the thing, remove the distress, let her go back to flashcards she understood. Instead, I said, “Let’s make the first step smaller. Open the file and tell me what looks confusing.”
She sighed, opened it, and pointed. “There are people in here twice. And some of these zip codes are missing.”
“Okay,” I said. “Then the next action isn’t ‘fix spreadsheet.’ It’s ‘remove duplicate rows.’ Let’s see if you can find that in the help bar.”
We watched a four-minute tutorial together, but she did the clicking. Twenty minutes later, she had a cleaner file and a draft email that said, “I cleaned the first 200 responses. I found duplicate emails and missing zip codes. Should I remove the duplicates or flag them for review?”
It was not a polished professional product. It was better than that: it was a small, usable problem she had actually worked through.
I teach a first-year university seminar, so Maya’s Sunday-night panic was familiar. A few weeks earlier, I had given my students a short exercise based on a real local issue. An after-school program wanted advice on whether moving its start time later would help attendance. I gave them two short articles, a simple budget table, and asked for a 300-word recommendation.
Hands went up.
“How many sources do we need?”
“Is this on the test?”
“Do you want bullet points or paragraphs?”
“Who is the audience again?”
They were not being difficult. They were trying to locate the hidden rules, because most of their school experience had taught them that every task comes with a clear target, a point value, and a preferred answer. One student, Devon, put it plainly after class: “Exams feel safe. You tell us what to memorize, we memorize it, and then it’s over. This other stuff just feels… open.”
He was right. Exams are predictable. Practical problems are open. That is exactly why students need more of them before graduation.
I am not suggesting universities should get rid of exams. In nursing, engineering, accounting, and some science courses, certain knowledge has to be fast and automatic. Professionals may need to recognize symptoms, formulas, legal constraints, or safety risks under pressure. Well-designed exams can build retrieval habits and identify gaps. Multiple-choice tests can also be a fair way to assess large groups when resources are limited.
The trouble starts when exams become the main evidence of learning for four years. A student can pass a test and still not know how to hand off a project, interpret a confusing contract, clean a data set, explain a technical problem to a nonexpert, or write an email that asks a clear question. Those skills are not extra “career training.” They are what people actually do with knowledge.
At our kitchen table, Maya’s exam studying and her internship task were using different muscles. Studying for biology mostly meant organizing information, repeating it, and recognizing correct answers. The spreadsheet required her to decide what mattered, tolerate ambiguity, make a judgment, and tell someone what she needed.
That distinction matters for parents trying to help. When a college student calls about a difficult course, our first question is usually “What’s your grade?” or “Have you talked to the professor?” Those are reasonable. But I have started adding quieter questions: “What have you actually done with this material?” “Can you think of a situation where this would come up outside class?” “What could you make, write, analyze, or fix using it?”
Those questions can lead to small changes. Instead of only reviewing notes, a student might turn a theory into a one-page explanation for a friend. Instead of just memorizing marketing terms, they might look at a local store’s social media and write three specific suggestions. A history student might turn an essay argument into a short memo explaining what a modern organization could learn from it. None of that replaces studying, but it gives knowledge somewhere to go.
Practical work also needs to be broken into physical actions. “Finish project” is not a useful instruction. “Open the data file, save a second version, remove duplicates, and list two questions” is useful. When Maya got stuck, I asked her, “What have you already tried? Where exactly are you stuck?” That question often moves students from panic to a concrete obstacle.
For teachers and universities, the shift does not have to mean replacing every exam with a grand internship. It can be smaller and more realistic. One exam can become a case study. A lecture can end with five minutes of students writing advice to a real person facing the problem just described. A research paper can include a one-page summary for a public audience. Large courses can use peer feedback on short application tasks, even when feedback is limited to a rubric and one comment.
I also give students a script for office hours because many do not know how to ask for help with open-ended work: “I understand the main concepts, but I’m having trouble applying them. Here’s what I tried, and here’s where I got stuck.” That sentence helps them come prepared without pretending they should already know everything.
Parents can help with course selection, too. Before registration, I now suggest looking at the assessment section of a syllabus, not just the professor’s rating. If every course is weighted heavily toward multiple-choice tests and timed essays, ask an advisor where students complete projects, presentations, undergraduate research, student teaching, consulting work, or community-based assignments. Those courses can be messier and sometimes harder, but they leave students with actual work they can explain.
At home, we changed Sunday planning. Maya no longer writes only “study for biology.” Her list now includes specific exam tasks like “review chapter six quiz questions for forty-five minutes” and practical tasks like “draft two questions for internship email.” The second item is not treated as optional life administration. It is part of her education.
Maya got a B+ on that biology exam. She was pleased, checked the grade once, and then opened her laptop because her internship supervisor had written back: “Good calls. Can you do the next 500 responses?”
She did not know exactly how to handle every new problem in the file. She created a folder, saved a renamed copy, and started removing duplicates. The flashcards are still on the table, and exams will continue to matter. But some Sunday soon, I hope she spends a little less time proving what she remembers and a little more time learning what she can do with it.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should Universities Focus More on Practical Skills Than Exams