Should Universities Prioritize Practical Skills Over Exams? What I See As a High School Teacher
Last November, Lila, one of my top-scoring AP Economics seniors, showed up to after-school office hours crumpling her early decision acceptance letter to our state university’s business program. Her usual stack of flashcards, dotted with coffee stains and little star stickers for terms she’d mastered, sat forgotten on the corner of my desk, next to a half-melted iced pumpkin latte. She’d spent the previous Friday shadowing her older cousin at a small marketing agency downtown, and the day had knocked every bit of her usual confidence loose.
“I can recite cross-price elasticity in my sleep,” she said, picking at the edge of the “future CEO” sticker on her laptop. “I got a 5 on every AP exam I took last year. But when her boss asked me to pull a simple demographic report from Google Sheets? I froze. I didn’t even know where to click. I’ve spent four years studying for tests, and I don’t know how to do anything that actually matters for a job.”
Her mom, who’d waited in the hallway while Lila and I talked, poked her head in a minute later, holding a half-scrawled grocery list with milk and dog food written at the top. “I hope you don’t mind me jumping in,” she said. “We always did everything the guidance office told us. Honor classes, good test scores, all the right extracurriculars. We thought if she checked those boxes, she’d be set after graduation. Is that not how it works anymore?”
I didn’t have a quick answer for her that afternoon, and I still don’t. I’ve taught 12th grade social studies and economics at our public high school for 11 years, and this question comes up every single fall, as seniors send off college applications and start to wonder what comes after. The debate over practical skills versus exams often gets framed as an either-or, but from what I’ve seen watching graduates move through college and into work, it’s rarely that simple.
My own nephew Javi graduated two years ago from a well-regarded public university computer science program with a 3.9 GPA, summa cum laude, and half a dozen internship offers before he walked across the graduation stage. His parents threw him a big backyard barbecue, hung his diploma on the wall next to his high school soccer trophies. Three months into his job at a regional fintech, he showed up to Sunday dinner at my sister’s house still wearing his work lanyard, pushing meatloaf around his plate like he was 14 and in trouble for skipping homework.
He told me every one of his college exams had been closed-book, timed, and done alone, most of them handwritten on blank paper to mimic old industry standards. He could write a 100-line sorting algorithm from memory in 45 minutes without a single typo. But his day-to-day work looked nothing like that. Most days, he debugged messy code written by three people who’d left the company before he was hired. He collaborated with teammates spread across two time zones through GitHub, and had to explain technical tradeoffs to product managers who didn’t know the difference between Java and JavaScript. He’d never done any of those tasks for a grade. “I feel like I studied four years for a test no one is actually giving,” he told me that night. It took him six months to stop feeling like he’d somehow scammed his way into the job.
A few years before that, I had a student named Ty who enrolled in an experimental project-based engineering program at a small private college, built in response to exactly the kind of frustration Javi described. The program cut high-stakes midterms and finals almost entirely; 80% of every grade came from group builds, client projects, and hands-on lab work. Ty loved it. He graduated with a 3.4, a portfolio of three full bridge design projects he’d done for local municipal governments, and a job offer before he finished his last semester. But when he sat down to take his professional engineering licensing exam six months later, he failed the first practice test by 20 points.
He texted me a screenshot of his score from his parents’ basement, where he was crashing while he studied, a half-empty bag of Cheetos visible over his shoulder in the selfie he sent. He’d never had to cram 18 weeks of cumulative material into a single four-hour timed test. He’d never had to memorize core load calculation formulas, because every college project let him look them up in reference books. The licensing board didn’t care how well he could collaborate on a team design. They cared that he could recall core safety information quickly, under pressure, without Wi-Fi or a teammate to ask. He ended up taking six weeks off work, paying $800 for a test prep course, and passing on his second try. It worked out, but it cost him time and money his program hadn’t prepared him to spend.
Those two stories are what I think about every time someone asks if universities should just scrap exams entirely and focus only on job skills. Exams do real work that projects can’t always replicate. They force students to lock in baseline knowledge that keeps people safe, in fields from engineering to nursing to education. They teach people to perform under pressure, a skill that comes up for big client presentations, emergency work deadlines, and required professional licensing tests long after graduation. The problem isn’t exams themselves. The problem is that most four-year universities still weight exams so heavily that students can walk across a graduation stage with top grades and almost no practice doing the day-to-day work their job actually requires.
Over the past few years, I’ve started sharing small, specific steps with the parents and students I work with, none of which require picking an entirely different college or quitting a degree program. For families still comparing college offers, I tell them to skip the glossy marketing brochures about “career readiness” and pull the public syllabi for two required upper-level classes in the student’s intended major. Most departments post these online for current students. Count how much of the final grade comes from timed, closed-book exams, and how much comes from individual work on projects, client work, lab hours, or a final portfolio. When you talk to an admissions representative at a college fair, skip the generic questions about dorm food and ask one specific line: “What share of your graduates leave this program with three completed work samples they can show a hiring manager?” The answer will tell you more about how the program balances skills and tests than any billboard.
For students already enrolled in exam-heavy programs, or high schoolers getting ready to start, the fix doesn’t have to involve adding a heavy minor or an unpaid internship on top of a full course load. I tell students to tie one small practical task to every major exam unit, something that takes 45 minutes or less. If you’re studying consumer segmentation for a marketing midterm, don’t just memorize the four categories. Pull the public follower demographics for a local small business’s Instagram account and jot down three quick ideas for how they could reach one underserved group. If you’re studying cell biology for a pre-med exam, spend 20 minutes writing a one-paragraph explanation of the cell cycle that you could use to explain a test result to a 12-year-old patient. It’s enough to build the habit of connecting what you memorize for a test to what you’d actually do with that information after graduation.
For parents, the smallest shift is the easiest to make at home. When your kid calls home excited about acing a midterm, celebrate that, don’t brush it off. Then ask one simple follow-up: “What’s one thing you studied for that test that you could use at your summer job, or that club you’re in, or even around the house?” It doesn’t turn into a big lecture about career readiness. It just trains them to stop treating exam knowledge as something that only exists to get a score on a piece of paper.
Lila started college this fall, and she texted me last week after she got her first macroeconomics midterm score back. She got an A, same as she always did on tests in high school. She also joined the student consulting club on campus, and her first project is helping a local houseplant shop adjust their pricing and their social media schedule for the holiday season. She said she still stays up later than she wants to cramming for quizzes, and she’s already noticed that half the stuff on the exam doesn’t come up in her club work, but she’ll have a real project to put on her resume by December.
Her mom emailed me a few weeks ago, to say thank you for talking that day last fall. She added that she still worries sometimes, that Lila is spreading herself too thin, that if she decides to go to business school later, her exam grades will matter more than any consulting project. I don’t have a good answer for that. Some paths still rely heavily on test scores, and that’s not going to change overnight.
Last week I finished grading a stack of my own AP Government exams, split evenly between 60 multiple-choice questions and a take-home project where students had to write a real public comment for their city council about a proposed new apartment development near the high school. A handful of students aced every multiple choice question and turned in stiff, generic comments that sounded like they copied lines from a textbook. A couple got solid Bs on the multiple choice section and wrote short, clear, specific comments that sounded like actual constituents talking to people who represent them. I don’t know which group will end up better off five years from now. I don’t think universities have to pick one thing entirely to do right by students. But most are still tilted far enough toward exam scores that a lot of kids like Lila figure out the gap on their own, after they’ve already moved in and paid their first tuition bill.
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