Should Universities Prioritize Practical Skills Over Exams? What I Learned From My Son’s First Internship
Last November, at 8:17 on the Tuesday of Thanksgiving break, I found my 20-year-old son Javi slouched over our kitchen table, half a leftover turkey sandwich congealing next to his open laptop. He’s a sophomore business major at our local state university, pulled a 3.8 GPA his first three semesters, aced every marketing principles and consumer behavior exam he’d taken. That night, he’d just gotten his first formal feedback from the part-time internship he’d worked three months to land.
“They said I can’t build a usable content calendar,” he said, stabbing a rogue crouton with his fork. “I got a 96 on the exam about content strategy. I can recite the four P’s in my sleep. I just… didn’t know they wanted me to actually work Google Sheets without a pre-made template they handed out first.”
I work part-time as an aide in our high school’s career and technical education department, so I’d heard versions of this complaint from dozens of graduates over the years. I’d always written it off as standard new-job jitters, the expected gap between textbook learning and real work. Sitting across from Javi that night, watching him toggle between his internship feedback and the 12-page final exam study guide he had due the next week, I got it for the first time. The problem wasn’t that Javi was lazy, or that his professors were bad at their jobs. The problem was the scale: 75% of his grade for that marketing class came from two proctored, multiple-choice exams. The remaining 25% came from open-book online quizzes and participation points. He never once had to turn in a piece of work that looked like something he’d actually make on the job.
That break, he spent 12 total hours making flashcards for his business law final, worth 40% of his semester grade. He spent 45 minutes reworking that content calendar, squeezing the work in between dinner and a late-night study session, because the exam grade counted toward his GPA, which counted toward grad school applications, which counted toward every future opportunity he’d been told to chase. The internship feedback, for all that it stung, didn’t count for anything on his transcript.
A month later, I tagged along to a department parent networking night and ended up talking to Clara Hale, the professor who taught Javi’s marketing principles class. She’d spent eight years in brand marketing before switching to teaching, and laughed when I mentioned the content calendar mishap. She’d fought for two years to add a live client project to the 101 syllabus, but accreditation rules require 60% of all core major grades to come from proctored exams, to guard against grade inflation and standardize learning across 12 adjunct-led sections.
“Half the alumni who come back say the exams were total garbage, nothing they studied showed up their first year on the job,” she told me. “The other half say the core theory they memorized for those exams is what kept them from making a six-figure mistake when a client threw a last-minute request at them. Both groups are right.”
That lines up with what I saw from Javi’s roommate, a computer science major in a program that weights almost all grades toward group build projects, with almost no high-stakes exams. Last summer at his software internship, he spent three weeks fumbling through a 10-year-old legacy code base. All his class projects were built from scratch with friends, and no exam had ever forced him to memorize core syntax rules that interns from the more exam-heavy state school could pull up without a Google search. Exams aren’t useless. They test recall and consistency, and they’re far more fair for students who work 20 or 30 hours a week to pay tuition: everyone gets the same two hours, the same prompt, no penalty for missing a 2pm group meeting because you’re waiting tables. Shifting all grades to open-ended practical projects sounds great until you realize first-gen and low-income students are the ones who get stuck carrying dead weight in groups, or lose points because they can’t meet off campus for field work.
The real issue isn’t that practical skills are inherently better than exams. It’s that most four-year programs have tipped the scale too far toward exam scores, with no room for low-stakes practice that lets kids mess up before a boss is paying them to get it right. Parents don’t have to wait for universities to rewrite their entire rulebooks to help their kids close that gap. The steps are small, and don’t require quitting the degree plan or skipping study sessions to chase unpaid internships.
When Javi and I sat down after that bad feedback, we didn’t have a big talk about “real world readiness” or call his advisor to complain. We pulled up three free 15-minute YouTube tutorials for building content calendars in Google Sheets, and I sat with him while he worked through them, answering the occasional basic question he didn’t want to ask his supervisor. That was it. Later, when he studied for his consumer behavior final, memorizing different generational spending segments, we worked out a tiny routine: after every 10 flashcards, he spent 10 minutes pulling three real social media ads from the company he interned at, labeled which segment each ad targeted, and jotted a one-sentence observation to his supervisor. It added less than an hour to his total study time, and one observation ended up shaping the company’s January back-to-school campaign.
For parents of high schoolers touring colleges, I now tell people to skip the dining hall questions and ask one specific thing of their major’s tour guide: what percentage of grades for entry-level major classes come from work for real outside clients, versus proctored exams? Most colleges advertise “90% job placement” that counts any part-time retail or food service work after graduation, not roles tied to the degree. For instructors updating syllabi, Clara’s trick is easy to steal: she swapped just 10% of her final exam’s multiple-choice weight for a 20-minute practical task. Students get a one-paragraph email from a local small business owner asking for a quick marketing idea, and write a three-sentence response right there in the exam room, no notes. It’s the exact kind of quick request they’ll get over Slack on their second week of work, and it doesn’t tank anyone’s grade if they mess it up. The first semester she ran it, half her A students failed that one question, but every one said it was the most useful part of the class.
Last week, Javi texted me a blurry photo from his internship desk. A cheap whiteboard propped next to his monitor has finance midterm terms scribbled down one side and three client content deadlines scrawled on the other. He got a 50-cent an hour raise last month, after he figured out how to link his content calendars to the client’s point-of-sale sales tracker, a trick no previous intern had bothered to set up. He still calls me some nights complaining that half his exam studying feels like jumping through arbitrary hoops, but he doesn’t blow off studying anymore. A few weeks ago, he used contract rules he memorized for that business law final to flag a one-sided liability clause in an influencer agreement his team was about to sign, saving the company potentially thousands of dollars.
Clara’s still fighting the department to shift another 10% of exam weight to practical work, and the accreditation committee is still pushing back. Javi still has weeks where three exam deadlines line up with last-minute client requests, and he’ll grumble that no one involved seems able to agree on what college is actually supposed to prepare him for. I don’t have a clean answer to whether universities should prioritize practical skills over exams, and I don’t think a single universal split would work for every major. What I do know is that for most kids, the gap between acing an exam and doing the work is smaller than we make it sound. It doesn’t take a full curriculum overhaul to cross it. Most of the time, it just takes 45 minutes and a free YouTube tutorial.
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