Should Universities Focus More on Practical Skills Than Exams? What Parents and Teachers Need to Know
The kitchen clock said 9:47 when Leo pushed his laptop away. His Comm 101 exam was in two days, and flashcards covered the table between a half-empty bowl and a phone charger that kept slipping off the edge.
“I know all the terms,” he said. “I just don’t know what a sponsorship email is supposed to look like.”
Leo is in his first year at university. He had come home Sunday to do laundry and study. His student club’s events team had asked him to email a local café about an upcoming panel and put together a simple budget, around three hundred dollars. He could name four promotion models and explain the difference between earned and paid media. He could probably answer multiple-choice questions about both. But he had never written a professional email asking for something, and he had never made a budget that included tax, tips, or the possibility that fewer people might show up.
I sat down beside him, but I didn’t take the laptop. We opened a blank document and I asked what the café owner would need to know before saying yes. He listed the event, the date, the expected crowd, and what the café might get out of it. Then I asked him to write the email in four sentences: greeting, context, clear request, available times.
He frowned. “That’s it?”
“That’s the first version,” I said.
The email took fifteen minutes. The budget took longer, mostly because he had not thought to add a column for “things that might go wrong.” We added service fees, cups, and a small extra amount for last-minute supplies. The café eventually said no, but it wrote a polite reply. Leo counted that as a win, which was reasonable.
As a parent and high school teacher, I have seen this pattern often. Students can prepare for exams, memorize sheets, and perform well under timed conditions. Then they reach university or work and hit tasks that do not come with four answer choices: drafting a message someone might actually read, planning an event, fixing a spreadsheet, explaining a mistake, or adjusting a project after feedback.
This is why the question “Should universities focus more on practical skills than exams?” matters, but the answer is not simply to replace exams with projects. Exams still have value. They help students retrieve information, show basic knowledge, and prepare for situations where some facts do need to be quickly available. The problem arises when exams become the main measure of learning in fields where graduates will spend much more time writing, planning, calculating, collaborating, and revising than sitting in silence with a test paper.
Universities often rely on exams for understandable reasons. Large lectures make multiple-choice tests efficient. They are easier to grade, compare, and moderate. Practical tasks require smaller classes, more instructor time, clearer feedback, and sometimes messy judgment about what “good” work looks like. But efficiency for the institution is not the same as preparation for the student.
I am not suggesting universities turn every course into an internship or remove theory. Practical work without underlying knowledge can become shallow technique. A student who can write a catchy email but cannot explain the course concepts will eventually hit a ceiling. The better balance is to keep some exams while making applied work a regular, graded part of learning—not one giant group project at the end of term.
When families ask me what to look for in a university program, I now suggest checking more than residence halls and class sizes. Look at the course syllabus, if possible, and see how much of the grade comes from exams versus tasks that resemble real work. If more than about seventy percent is exams in a professional or applied field, that is worth questioning. Ask whether students write memos, build budgets, run small studies, create lesson plans, complete code reviews, present to an audience, or work with real clients. Also ask whether they get feedback and a chance to revise. A single final project with no draft stage is often almost as limited as an exam.
During a campus tour, a useful question to ask a student guide is: “What did you make or redo in a first-year class?” If they can describe a paper, presentation, lab report, or prototype they changed after feedback, that tells you something. If they pause and say they mostly remember midterms and finals, that tells you something too.
Parents cannot redesign a university course, but they can help at home without doing the work. If your student has an exam-heavy semester, try adding one small weekly task connected to what they are studying. Twenty to thirty minutes is enough. A business student could compare two phone plans and recommend one in three sentences. A biology student could read a public health webpage and identify two terms from lecture. A history student could write a short paragraph connecting a past event to a current local decision. The goal is not extra homework; it is helping them see that course knowledge can be used outside the exam hall.
When they get stuck, avoid taking over. Try asking:
“What does the other person need to know?”
“What is the smallest first piece?”
“Can you send a rough version and ask one question?”
Those questions work because most practical uncertainty feels huge until it is broken into a first action. Many students also need help understanding that office hours are not only for confusion about lecture content. They can ask about the structure of an email, the wording of a request, or why a grade on a writing assignment was lower than expected. A simple script helps: “Hi Professor, I’m working on the memo and I’m stuck on how to explain the budget limit. I’ve tried writing it two ways. Could I ask about it during office hours?”
For teachers and instructors, even small assessment changes can make a difference. Replace twenty percent of a final exam with an applied task. Break a project into a one-page proposal, a draft, and a revised final version. Allow resubmission for partial credit. Keep groups small enough that one student cannot quietly do everything. Give students an example of ordinary, competent work—not only the perfect model—and point out exactly what makes it usable. These changes are more work, but they give students practice with the messiness of real learning.
Leo earned a B+ on his Comm exam. He was pleased, though slightly annoyed that the grade did not reflect how much time he had spent on flashcards. His event budget also contained an error: he forgot the platform’s processing fee, so the club spent about thirty-one dollars more than expected. He had to explain the mistake in a meeting and change the template for the next event.
Neither experience by itself was enough. The exam gave him a shared vocabulary. The email and budget gave him a small, imperfect chance to use it. His second-semester schedule is still lecture-heavy, but he signed up for an optional spreadsheet workshop and keeps a folder labeled “stuff I made and messed up.” Some Sundays he still spreads flashcards across the kitchen table. Lately, though, he sometimes opens a document first and tries to make something before he starts memorizing words for the test.
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