Should Universities Prioritize Practical Skills Over Exams? What I’ve Learned From My Students and My Own Teen
Last month, I met Lila, a student from my 10th grade AP Biology class, for coffee on a rainy Tuesday near her state university’s campus. She’s three years into a nursing degree, just got her pathophys midterm grade back that morning, and she was picking at a blueberry scone like it had personally offended her. She’d gotten a 94%, one of the highest scores in her 320-person lecture. But three days earlier, during her first ever clinical rotation, an elderly patient’s IV line had started beeping an occlusion alarm, and her preceptor nurse had asked her to grab a 10 milliliter saline flush from the supply cart down the hall.
“I could recite the osmolarity of every standard saline solution backwards for that test,” she said, wiping rain off the strap of her overstuffed backpack. “I wrote three essay answers about what happens if you give the wrong concentration. But I stood there in that supply closet for 45 seconds staring at vial labels like I’d never seen one before. The nurse had to come check on me. I felt like I’d wasted three years.”
I left that coffee shop with a crumpled napkin and the same question I’ve gotten from half a dozen parents of high school seniors this fall: should universities stop weighting exams so heavily, and focus more on practical skills that actually matter on the job? I taught high school science for 12 years, and I’m now the parent of a 17-year-old engineering applicant who spreads college brochures across my dining room table most nights, so I’ve seen this from both sides. It’s not as simple as “exams are useless” or “practical skills are just a trendy add-on.”
Two years ago, Javi, another former student, graduated with a 3.9 GPA in computer science from a well-regarded regional university. He aced every algorithms and data structures exam he took, aced the technical interview for his dream software engineering internship, and texted me panicking at 10 p.m. on his third day because he couldn’t push a line of code to the team’s shared repository without breaking three other people’s work. His entire four-year degree had included one 20-minute lecture on Git, the standard version control tool every developer uses every single day. All his exams were hand-written pseudocode on paper, no shared work, no troubleshooting when things went wrong. He spent three nights working through free YouTube tutorials to catch up, and he ended up doing fine at the internship, but he told me later he couldn’t believe he’d paid four years of tuition to learn the most basic part of his job from a guy with a ring light in his bedroom.
Stories like these make it easy to say universities should dump most exams entirely, and just have students build things and work in clinics and on job sites from day one. My own son Ethan says that at least once a week while he fills out applications. “No one’s ever going to hand me a closed-book physics test when I’m designing a bridge,” he points out, and he’s not wrong. But I’ve also seen what happens when students skip the baseline knowledge exams force you to build. Lila told me that day at the coffee shop that after she froze up at the supply cart, she eventually grabbed the right vial because she kept replaying the multiple choice question from her midterm about what happens to red blood cells if you use sterile water instead of normal saline. Javi told me later that the only reason he didn’t panic and delete the entire team’s project when he messed up that Git push was that years of timed exams had taught him to slow down and troubleshoot one step at a time when he’s stressed. Exams aren’t inherently useless. They’re just wildly overprioritized right now, at the cost of almost everything else.
For parents walking through college applications with their teens right now, you don’t have to rely on a brochure’s “hands-on learning” marketing line to figure out where a program actually stands. I did this with Ethan a few weeks ago, and it took 20 minutes total. Pull up the public syllabi for three required second-year core classes on the department’s website. Most programs post them openly for current students, so you don’t even have to email an advisor. Add up what percentage of the final grade comes from timed, closed-book exams, versus graded practical work: lab time that isn’t just following a pre-written worksheet, client projects, clinical rotations, team design work, co-op hours. If exams make up 70% or more of the grade across all three classes, that’s a red flag, even if the school’s website has a whole page about career prep. Many programs advertise internships but push all practical work to the final semester of senior year, when students have already spent three years only learning how to take tests.
If your kid is already in university and complains that they spend all their time studying for recall exams and don’t feel ready for work, skip the generic line “good grades are what get you the job.” Last time Ethan ranted about this, I pulled up an entry-level civil engineering job posting from the city’s public works department and we went through it line by line over takeout pizza. We circled every requirement that had nothing to do with exam scores: being able to explain construction delays to neighborhood groups, read commercial blueprints, adjust designs when a supplier runs out of a specific material. We picked one low-effort skill to work on each semester, outside of class, that exams don’t cover. This year, it’s free blueprint reading tutorials through the local community college’s continuing education program, one hour a week. For nursing students, that can be picking up one monthly shift as a trainee CNA at a local nursing home, instead of waiting until junior year for required clinicals. For communications majors, that can be running the Instagram account for a local animal rescue for free, instead of just writing essays about social media theory. It doesn’t require a fancy unpaid internship across the country, and it doesn’t take meaningful time away from studying for exams.
Universities often push back that shifting to more practical work is too expensive, especially for 300-person intro lectures. You can’t give every student one-on-one clinical time with a tenured professor on a tight state budget. But small shifts don’t cost much. When I was still in the classroom, I swapped 15% of every unit exam’s weight from multiple-choice recall questions to 10-minute practical stations around the room. For my cell biology unit, one station had three fake urine samples and a test strip, and students had to flag which sample came from a patient with undiagnosed diabetes and explain their reasoning, just like they would at a primary care visit. I didn’t cut any content from the unit, I didn’t need new textbooks, I just asked a couple of upperclassmen who’d taken the class before to help man the stations during exam period. A lot of nursing and engineering programs already use upperclassmen to run small practice labs for $15 an hour, which costs a fraction of hiring more full-time professors, and gives the older students a chance to brush up on their own skills.
Ethan submitted his early decision application last week, to a program that requires 12 months of paid co-op work before graduation, but still weights three closed-book exams per core class at 60% of the grade. He still grumbles about having to pass two more physics exams before he’s allowed to use the department’s machine shop. Last night I found him at the dining room table after I got home from work, half-watching a blueprint reading tutorial while he ate cereal, pausing every two minutes to scribble notes in the margin of his physics workbook. Lila texted me a photo yesterday, grinning in scrubs, holding up a signed sign-off sheet that says she can do saline flushes on her own now. She still got that A in pathophys. She says she still double-checks every vial label twice when she’s tired after a 12-hour shift, same way she double-checked every multiple choice answer on her midterm. The system hasn’t shifted all the way yet. Most big public universities still run on cheap, easy-to-grade exams, and treat practical skills like a box to tick right before graduation. But for the kids I know, balancing both things, one small extra step at a time, works well enough for now.
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