Should Universities Focus More on Practical Skills Than Exams? What I Learned Watching My Son Graduate
Last May, I leaned against my kitchen counter and watched my oldest son Liam refresh his email for the 12th time that hour. His business degree diploma was still in its cardboard envelope propped against the toaster, next to a half-melted iced coffee and a crumpled printout of a rejection email from the local marketing firm he’d dreamed of working at since sophomore year. The chipped linoleum by the fridge still had a stain from graduation party chocolate cake two days prior. “I got a 3.8,” he said, not looking up from his laptop. “I can recite Porter’s Five Forces in 12 seconds flat. I can’t write a client check-in email without pulling up three templates first.”
We’d saved for 12 years to cover most of his in-state tuition at our flagship public university. He did everything everyone told him to do: went to lecture, turned in essays on time, pulled all-nighters during midterm season, quizzed himself with flashcards spread across our couch over Thanksgiving break. His summer internship the year before graduation counted for three class credits, but most days he just shadowed account managers and sat in on Zoom calls with his camera off. His final internship presentation got an A, but his manager pulled him aside on his last day and told him straight: he knew every answer the textbook asked for, but he froze when a client pushed a deadline up two days and the whole project plan had to shift.
I’ve sat on our university’s parent advisory board for two years now, so I’ve heard both sides of this argument play out over lukewarm coffee in windowless conference rooms. A lot of parents and recent graduates say exams are a pointless hoop, that universities should dump most high-stakes tests entirely and teach only skills that get people hired. A lot of long-time professors say practical skills training turns a university degree into a cheap trade certificate, that exams are the only fair way to make sure every student actually walks away with core knowledge. Before Liam graduated, I leaned more toward the practical side, but I didn’t have real skin in the game. Now I think most people framing this as an either/or are missing the point.
At our board meeting two months ago, a tenured chemistry professor named Dr. Rao talked about why she refused administration pressure to cut her midterm and final exam weighting from 70% to 30% of the grade. Three years back, she said, she tried a heavily project-based curriculum where most grades came from group lab work. One senior let his lab partners handle all the pre-lab reading and safety checks, aced every group assignment, and failed the mandatory safety exam she kept as a non-negotiable requirement. When he got a spot working in a private lab after graduation, he mixed two chemicals incorrectly because he’d never actually learned the rules on his own, and caused a small spill that sent two coworkers to urgent care.
Exams, she said, don’t just test memorization. They force you to learn material well enough to recall it when you’re working alone, no teammates to fall back on. They teach you to prepare for a hard deadline, to perform under pressure—skills that do show up on the job when a server crashes at 4pm on a Friday. That stuck with me. Liam told me just last week, when he had to pull a late night fixing a broken ad campaign for a client, that he learned how to push through stress and manage his time studying for three finals in one week. He never would have built that stamina from long-term projects where he could ask for extensions three times.
But that doesn’t mean the current setup at most schools works. When Liam went to that first marketing firm interview, no one asked him to name the four P’s of marketing or break down a case study from 2007, the stuff he’d spent 20 hours memorizing for his final. They sat him down at a desk, gave him a scenario: a long-time client just emailed saying they’re cutting their budget by 30% and want to cancel their contract. Write a 150-word response in 20 minutes. He stumbled through it, over-apologized, didn’t offer any alternative smaller packages, and left knowing he’d blown it. None of his exams had ever asked him to do anything like that. Across all four years, 85% of his grades came from multiple-choice tests or long essays about pre-written case studies where every problem had a clear answer. Real work almost never has clear answers.
I get asked all the time by friends whose kids are starting college what they should look for in classes, and I never tell them to avoid hard classes with hard exams. I tell them to pull up the syllabus before registration, and ask one simple question: what percentage of the grade comes from work that looks like something you’d actually do after graduation? If 90% of the grade is a midterm and final, it’s not automatically a bad class, but balance it out with one class a semester that has hands-on work. When Liam was picking his senior digital marketing class, he almost picked the easy section with two multiple-choice exams and no projects. I told him to take the harder section that required a semester-long project building a social media plan for a local coffee shop, even if it meant a couple late nights. That project is still the first thing he shows hiring managers, and it’s the reason he got the part-time contract job he started last week.
For professors I talk to who want to adjust but don’t have time to rewrite their entire curriculum, it doesn’t have to be a full overhaul. You don’t have to throw out your exams entirely. A lot of instructors I know have swapped just 10 or 15% of the final exam grade from extra multiple-choice questions to a 10-minute applied task. For a business class, instead of asking students to list negotiation tactics, give them a short scenario of a supplier raising prices last minute and ask them to write three bullet points of how they’d respond. For a biology class, after testing students on cell division, ask them to write a three-sentence explanation of that concept for a 12-year-old whose parent just got a cancer diagnosis—something a nurse or science educator would actually have to do. It adds almost no extra grading time, you can even do peer reviews for the low-stakes tasks, but it forces students to stop treating textbook knowledge as something you memorize and dump after the test.
Last night, Liam was back at my kitchen table, typing up a content schedule for the coffee shop, and he got an email inviting him to a second interview for a full-time account coordinator role across town. He whooped a little when he saw it, then went back to squinting at a spreadsheet of engagement metrics. He still studies for the free digital marketing certifications he’s working through, still takes practice tests to learn the core terms. He says he’s glad he had to build that study habit, glad he knows the theory behind the work he does. But he still says he wishes he’d gotten more chances to mess up low-stakes client emails and broken project plans in class, where a bad grade doesn’t cost him a job, instead of learning all that on the fly six months after graduation.
The business school at Liam’s university is still voting on whether to adjust the curriculum to require at least one applied project per core class. A lot of long-time faculty are still pushing back, worried it will take time away from the theory and exam content they’ve taught for decades. I don’t know if the change will pass this year, or if a degree five years from now will look meaningfully different from the one Liam earned. What I do know is that no one wins when we treat exams and practical skills as enemies. Most of us don’t want a graduate who can send a good email but can’t explain why their strategy works. We also don’t need a graduate who can recite every textbook framework but can’t talk to a client. For now, we’re just taking it one job interview, one spreadsheet, one revised client email at a time.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should Universities Focus More on Practical Skills Than Exams