What do you think of the idea of allowing a person to get the equivalent of a college degree through certification tests?

Sounds great to me. Why should someone whose daddy could afford university get a degree, when someone who worked in the field for years not have one?

And we’re going to ignore my abysmal grammar today. I’m fighting a migraine and can’t focus on my writing.

It’d be great sure, but the cynic in me says this will never happen if only for the fact that colleges in this country make far faaaaaar too much money off of us as it is.

I really like the idea. Who cares how you learn as long as you learn the stuff. But I think uberbatman has a good point. Although the competition might force the colleges to cut some costs.

I think if a college degree were simply a matter of answering questions, than yes, this would be ok. However, college (just my opinion, others may agree or disagree) involves learning different ways to look at issues, not just answering true or false questions. I also feel that online courses don’t give the same detailed learning experience that sitting in a classroom does.

I’m all for it. We’re currently in a rush to flush most of our human capital down the toilet, apparently. If we don’t reverse course on that, we’ll surely fall to third-world status. The only caveat I would add is that certification testing should be more than just a series of true/false and multiple-choice questions. You shouldn’t get a bachelor’s degree and still be devoid of critical thinking skills or unable to write a coherent essay.

I think this maywell be the way higher education is heading. I think it has plusses and minuses but would be particularly useful in lower socio-economic or developing countries. I do mourn the loss of personal teaching but I think online courses are the wave of most of the future.

I don’t see why the tests should just be multiple choice or even simple one word answers. The tests should be of the same caliber as are given in universities. It will require qualified people to grade the tests. That will increase the cost but nowhere near the cost of taking a college course.

@ica, I understand your point, but let’s compare a large university lecture course to an online course. If the online course is done right, it has several advantages. It can be broken into relatively short pieces, making it easy to schedule and review. There can be online quizzes to test comprehension. The only thing missing is the interaction with the instructor, but how often is that available? For schools that provide that kind of interaction, it would still be worthwhile to have certain low level technical courses handled online. Another possibility would be to have students attend the lectures online and have small classes conducted by TAs to go over the material.

@janbb I agree, not having labs, talking with amazing professors, off campus life, etc would lose a lot of the experience. I learned a lot outside of school. I remember working on a budget committee for my fraternity and looking up and thinking “These are teens and 20’s something putting together a huge budget”. It seemed big at the time but that was interesting learning to run an organization.

Why not? If you can get your GED and call it good, why not a college degree too? Also, many people who graduate with a college degree wind up working in an unrelated field, but it just looks really good on a resume.

I don’t think so! Having a college degree means you were able to put up with, and survive four or five years of bull without going batshit crazy.
That cannot be achieved with just a test!

@rojo It also means your now an indentured server for the next 20–30 years of your life

Hell yes. If you have all the necessary knowledge and can prove it, why not? That being said I do think it should be a difficult test, but that’s a given.

Credit by examination for certain courses, yes. Degree by exam, no.

To add my own bit of personal experience to this without sounding to full of myself…. My passion is marine biology, as such I do a lot of reading on the subject in my free time. When I finally decided to go back to school for this I was astounded by the fact that I knew more about the subject than seniors graduating with a degree in marine bio. So here I am 60k in the hole to get a piece of paper that tells me I know what I’ve already known for years….

@uberbatman Exactly. It’s insane isn’t it? Something is wrong…

@deni Very wrong. It’s especially annoying to me since while I was in Belize on one of the cayes I was offered a job to run a field station there to perform research/sustain the reef surrounding the island. Without a degree in this country such a job offer would be unimaginable.

@uberbatman Yes the piece of paper matters more to us now than the knowledge that you can obtain by being out in the natural world immersed in what actually matters. But instead…..its all about money. :(

I homeschooled for 10 years. I have led seminars on homeschooling, designed curriculum to teach a concept that was not taught in text books, and re-written curriculum to work for students with disabilities. Aside from classroom management, I know more about teaching than many teachers do.

I have a high school diploma and a semester of college.

Edit:
Four years ago I began to volunteer teaching English as a second language. Sometimes I found myself with 4 students at 4 different levels in my class. I guess that does require a certain amount of classroom management.