Should Universities Prioritize Practical Skills Over Exams? What I’ve Learned From My Former Students
Last Tuesday, I sat across from Lila, one of my former AP Economics students, at the sticky laminate table of the coffee shop just off our state university’s campus. Rain dripped off her thrifted puffer coat draped over the chair back, and she poked at a half-eaten blueberry scone while scrolling rejection emails on her cracked iPhone. Six weeks earlier, she’d graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s in business administration, and she still couldn’t land an entry-level marketing job.
“I got straight A’s in every single marketing class,” she said, turning her phone to show me a screenshot of her transcript, the A’s lined up neat as pins. “I can crank out a 20-page case study on Coca-Cola’s 2022 rebrand in two hours flat. But every interview asks me to walk through building a Facebook ad set or drafting a casual client check-in email, and I freeze. We never did any of that. All we ever did was study for midterms and finals.”
Two weeks before that, another former student, Javi, stopped by my high school classroom after school with a gas station iced tea for me and news that he’d just finished his first full week as a marketing coordinator at a small local agency. Javi graduated from the exact same business program as Lila the same semester, with a 3.2 GPA. He missed three exam review sessions junior year to work 20 hours a week at a department-run internship, and nearly failed his business stats midterm because he spent the weekend before running a pop-up event for a local boutique. His interviewer never even asked his GPA. They looked at the portfolio of social media calendars and ad performance reports he’d built during his placement, and hired him on the spot. He did add, though, that the stats formulas he crammed for his cumulative final still come in handy every time he pulls a monthly client report.
I’ve had this conversation half a dozen times in the last two years, and it’s the first question most parents ask during 11th grade college planning meetings: should universities ditch exams to focus entirely on hands-on, practical skills? Most people frame this as an either-or argument. One side says exams are outdated, useless hoops that don’t prepare kids for real work. The other says shifting to practical training turns universities into trade schools and waters down academic rigor. From where I sit, watching kids move from my classroom through college and into their first jobs, neither side is quite right. The problem isn’t exams themselves. It’s that most four-year programs now weight exams for 70 to 80 percent of a student’s grade, not because exams are the best way to learn, but because they’re cheap and easy to grade. Intro lectures at our local state school hold 300 students each; most adjuncts are paid $3,000 a class and don’t have the time or budget to arrange placements, review portfolios, or give feedback on hands-on projects. Multiple-choice exams grade themselves. That’s not a choice about learning. It’s a choice about administrative convenience.
Exams do serve a real purpose, even for careers that feel entirely hands-on. Nursing instructors tell me cumulative exams are non-negotiable: no new grad should be on a hospital floor having to Google drug interactions when a patient’s vitals drop. Civil engineering students need to recall load formulas without pulling out a textbook when walking a construction site. Even for marketing majors like Lila, the study skills built preparing for exams—organizing 10 weeks of scattered material, performing under a tight deadline, recalling core facts without pausing to look everything up—translate directly to last-minute client requests and busy work weeks. Lila told me as much last week, after she landed a three-month temp data entry gig with a local sales team. The cram skills she honed for finals let her pull together a messy last-minute client report in two hours on her third day, and her boss already mentioned extending her contract.
The issue is that exams are being asked to do too much. A multiple-choice test can tell you if a student can recite the four Ps of marketing. It can’t tell you if they can write an ad that actually makes people click, calm down an upset client, or adjust a campaign when it’s underperforming. Those are the skills employers actually prioritize in entry-level interviews, and most students only get them if they can afford to take unpaid internships outside class time. That leaves low-income students, who often need paid jobs through college, locked out of entry-level roles even with perfect grades.
For parents and caregivers helping their teen pick a college or navigate their current program, this doesn’t require grand protests or transferring schools. There are small, concrete steps that make a far bigger difference. When reviewing a degree program, don’t just rely on glossy brochures talking about career readiness. Pull up the public syllabi for three required upper-division classes, and count how much of the final grade comes from timed exams versus projects, client work, or portfolios. If exams make up 70 percent or more of every required class, that’s a red flag, even if the school has a famous name. If your student is already in an exam-heavy program, encourage them to carve out just two to three hours a week for one small hands-on experience—no fancy national internship required. Lila built three sample ad campaigns for a fake local plant shop through a $25 four-week community education class, added them to her LinkedIn, and got her temp gig two weeks later. Most small local businesses will let a college student run their social media or update their website for $15 an hour, or even just a letter of recommendation, because most owners don’t have time for that work themselves. For instructors, you don’t have to rewrite your entire curriculum, either. I swapped 20 percent of my AP Econ midterm weight a few years ago, replacing a handful of multiple-choice questions with a short assignment where students price 10 common grocery staples at three local stores and explain why the costs differ. It adds an hour of grading time for my 90 students, and every year multiple kids tell me it’s the only assignment they still remember two years into college.
I don’t think exams will—or should—disappear entirely. I’ve seen what happens when programs swing too far the other way, ditching all cumulative assessments for unstructured group projects: last year a graduate from one of those “no exams” project-based programs applied for a part-time grading job with me, and she couldn’t calculate a percentage test score for a 10th grader. No one had ever checked that she’d mastered basic baseline skills, because no cumulative assessment flagged the gap.
Our local university’s business department voted last month to add a 120-hour practical placement as a graduation requirement starting next fall, and cut the weight of the intro marketing final from 40 percent to 20 percent. It’s a small shift, and it will be messy. Some placements will be busy work, some students will still slip through, and exams will still make up most of the grade for core classes. Lila texted me a photo of her desk earlier this week, a chipped thrifted mug that says “world’s okayest marketer” sitting next to her keyboard. She doesn’t know if the role will turn into a full-time job with benefits yet, and she’s still frustrated she had to learn basic ad skills on her own time after graduation. But she’s figuring it out, one campaign and one last-minute report at a time.
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