10 Comments

Agreed, high quality exams that you can retake multiple times and which relate closely to actual important skills would be super valuable.

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This relates to two ideas I was thinking about recently, one I like to call 'job dna' which would be a system of more granular/atomized certification or declaration of skills you posses where employers could really 'dot product your skill vector with job profile'.

Another thing I realized is that people will always learn for the exam/test so no matter what is the content of the lecture the students will use all available data and optimize their thinking/models (train their neural networks) for solving a specific task. And the exam/test credibility, the prestige of the institution that confirms your grade/credit is actually the only value people (students and employers) care about. This way IMO all course material should be open source and made free, but the exams should be made really hard and practical and these institutions should make sure that these exams/tests reflect the students skills/knowledge and that a given certificate/diploma means something. When you know what will the exams consist off then no matter how hard they are you will learn for it, either using free materials online or paid tutor. I don't know if you get the idea. The problem is not with people optimizing their learning for the exams, the problem is the exam grades/diplomas being meaningless for real-life applications.

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It seems worth noting that some elite schools already give away access to some of their courses (but not course credit) for free. For example: https://oyc.yale.edu/courses

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Yes, might be just three, instead of just one. Still, a very different world from ours.

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"here is a scale and scope effect that may push more toward a more Amazon-like scenario: giving students grades that are comparable over wide scopes"

I think of this signaling/certification role of colleges as similar to that performed by credit rating agencies. Instead of rating borrowers' creditworthiness, colleges rate students' employability. There are three major corporate credit rating agencies (S&P, Moody's, and Fitch) and three major consumer credit rating agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). There are also three major raters of college athletic prospects (247Sports, Rivals, ESPN). So, we might expect a small handful (2-4) of big brand name colleges to emerge that will perform this function instead of just 1 Amazon-like college. Employers may want some diversity of ratings agencies.

Another possibility is that there will be 2-4 raters of "elite" students, 2-4 raters of mid-tier students, 2-4 raters of lower tier students, etc. That would mimic today's higher education structure, except collapsing each tier to 2-4 schools. However, I'm not sure if there is a close analog to that for any other type of rating service.

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Executive summary:

Instead of GPAs, create standardized gamified tests for hundreds of discrete skills, and encourage students to grind and retest. This makes sorting job applicants easy: dot product your skill vector with job profile. To make instruction scale, curate the best lectures and playback at scheduled class times, with TAs on hand for help and proctoring.

Details:

Atomize certification:

No more arcane 1-page transcripts. Break it down into hundreds of individual skills, gamify the learning process for these skills, and put a huge amount of effort into making your tests universal gold standards like the SAT.

Let students retake tests as many times as they like. Every score is a percentile: you're 90th percentile in logarithms, 60th percentile in vocabulary, 80th percentile in factoring polynomials. Every attempt gets recorded: you went from 30th percentile in constitutional law at age 16 to 70th at age 20.

Finally, close the loop on certification. Instead of a generic "BS/MS CS" requirement for jobs ranging from game programming to embedded systems to web frontend, average the test scores of the hiring team across the whole spectrum. Now it's easy to rank the candidates: take the dot product of their scores with the average of the hiring team, and sort.

So instead of fighting over the grads from the top schools, you get the people with the specific fine grained skills you care about.

And students can look at the skills profile for the jobs they want and grind those skills. Want to be a Site Reliability Engineer for DeepMind? Your current dot product with that role's skills has you well below their threshold for an interview, but here are the skills to grind, sorted by weight. Cross the threshold, get an interview. Did you know you're a good fit for a role making $50k more than your current salary? Here are the skills to polish if you want to increase your chances at landing it.

Making university instruction scale:

College provides four things: community, structure, education, and certification, and these are largely separable.

Community is super valuable but I don't have a solution for that.

Structure is the most overlooked, which explains why independent study students do so poorly. Structure says, "There will be lectures and tests and grades and a final. If you can get your butt into a seat in this room at this time, knowledge will be presented to you. And it will all be over in 4 months." This is critical for both students and instructors. Traditional structure ties education and certification together, but these are separable, and I will propose alternative structures.

Education breaks down into lectures, homework, projects, labs and tutorial sessions. There are tons of lectures, homework sets and project requirements available online already, so you just need to curate and edit. That leaves labs and tutorial sessions.

Certification consists mainly of course grades aggregated into degrees. (Like academic journals, a real holdover from medieval times; years of work condensed down to a few sheets of paper you can carry with you.) Course grades come from graded assignments (now reguarly automated), and proctored tests.

The missing pieces are: structure, labs, tutorial sessions, graded assignments and proctored tests.

Structure, labs, tutorial sessions: Courses proceed on a schedule as in universities. Assemble a syllabus of the best existing lectures and assignments. Hire TAs and grad students. Refine lecture videos with editing and visual aids. Students watch recorded lectures instead of live, but labs and tutorial sessions are held in person with the TAs.

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This might be harder to arrange for courses in experimental science or the fine arts.

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A quick note, due to langauge differences, ten profs would be inadequate for each course. But the general idea stands to consider.

Such market concentration in education would open up many opportunities for corruption and therefore endanger the credibility of the industry itself.

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This sounds like a good idea as far as it goes -- but it does not address the real problem that is destroying higher education. The real problem is Critical professional-victim-group Theories -- both the fact that they are taught (thus creating undeserved hatred) and the fact that education institutions obey the Theories, for instance by lowering performance standards for "victim" groups while raising them for whites, Asians, and men.

To defeat that problem and serve the marketplace, then, these "new Amazons" will need to do, or hire done from a reliable source, the job the accreditation agencies have done up to now, but can no longer be trusted to do -- honest, color-blind evaluation, including requirements that grading and admissions be honest and color-blind too, and that lies such as "white privilege exists" and "systemic racism exists" NOT be taught as fact.

Higher education institutions that do not embrace these reforms will continue to lose reputation and their degrees will become worth less until no one goes there even if it's free.

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Another analogy would be the Shopify platform ($183 billion market cap; >1.7 million business users). White-labeled under each business brand, but all Shopify underneath implementing most of it.

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