I am in disagreement with the statement that exams provides proof that the student has learned the topic.
In my opinion, exams show which students have figured out how to beat the exam.
There might be some that do this by learning the topic, but in my experience the path of least resistance to a good grade has been to study the exam - not the topic of the course that it's based on.
As an example, I was one of the three people (out of 250 students) in my physical chemistry class that got the highest possible grade. I gained no understanding of the topic at all during that time - what I learned was to recognise which formula to use for specific problems on the test. I don't know what any of the results meant or what said result could be used for, simply that it was correct.
This correlates well with the observations made by Google and other large companies that analyse how to identify valuable hires. Turns out that there's no correlation between grades and workplace performance.
So if the exam result offers no information of the students ability to do a job in "real life" and at the same time introduce incentives that conflict with actually learning a topic, then I think it's better to significantly limit their importance or outright get rid of them.
I haven't been able to find any positive gains from having exams, but if someone has some resources on this, I'd be very curious to see it :-)
I agree that exams don't always do a great job of measuring actual competency, but I'm not sure they are worthless either.
> This correlates well with the observations made by Google and other large companies that analyse how to identify valuable hires. Turns out that there's no correlation between grades and workplace performance.
These observations probably suffer from a confounding effect known as range restriction. Basically, if Google generally only hires people with a GPA of 3.0 or above, they may have some idea of how GPA variation above that level correlates with job performance, but they don't know about it below that level. So they won't know if people with GPAs of 1.5 will do just as well at Google as people they normally consider.
Suppose Google started hiring people with much lower GPAs than they do today. Anyone want to make a bet what the outcome of that experiment would be?
Well, Google knows, and that's why they don't do the experiment.
Google has no requirements for GPA - here's a quote from 2013 by Lazlo Bock who served as Senior vice President of People operations at Google for several years:
"One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything."
This says nothing about whether Google has a range restriction effect. It just suggests that their HR doesn't know or care what range restriction is.
Google probably filters out low-GPA candidates based on their poor performance by other criteria. It doesn't mean GPA isn't predictive of how such candidates would perform at Google.
If this is untrue, let them bring out their parade of successful low-GPA engineers.
Where's your evidence that they do have a range restriction? Seems to me that you're moving the goal post without providing any justification for it.
There's plenty of sources online stating Google doesn't have a GPA requirement, that you're welcome to look up on your own time.
Besides those I can also tell from my own (and a couple of friends) experiences, interviewing with Google, that indeed they do not care about GPA - which is a plus when you consider, how many potential hires are not American and have used a completely different grading scheme.
The quote literally states the opposite of what you're claiming, according to Google - GPA does not in any way predict job performance, so why is it so important to you find a narrative, where it does?
What seems more likely - that several Google engineers all made an erroneous conclusion based on the available data or that they found that GPA has zero value in real life?
Ignoring range restriction is a very common and very consequential statistical fallacy. I'm not going to blindly assume that Google engineers are above statistical fallacies. Especially ones that embody universal human cognitive biases, like thinking that what you see is representative of everything that's out there.
There's plenty of evidence that grades matter in other contexts, so I'm not going to throw all of that out because some Google guy made a vaguely general claim based on his limited and very biased sample.
As I said, all Google has to do to refute my doubts is point out its huge population of very low GPA, very successful engineers. If GPA is meaningless, this should be a trivial thing for them to do.
In my opinion, exams show which students have figured out how to beat the exam.
There might be some that do this by learning the topic, but in my experience the path of least resistance to a good grade has been to study the exam - not the topic of the course that it's based on.
As an example, I was one of the three people (out of 250 students) in my physical chemistry class that got the highest possible grade. I gained no understanding of the topic at all during that time - what I learned was to recognise which formula to use for specific problems on the test. I don't know what any of the results meant or what said result could be used for, simply that it was correct.
This correlates well with the observations made by Google and other large companies that analyse how to identify valuable hires. Turns out that there's no correlation between grades and workplace performance.
So if the exam result offers no information of the students ability to do a job in "real life" and at the same time introduce incentives that conflict with actually learning a topic, then I think it's better to significantly limit their importance or outright get rid of them.
I haven't been able to find any positive gains from having exams, but if someone has some resources on this, I'd be very curious to see it :-)