But what it does threaten to do is effectively abandon all the efficiencies of the written word.
When higher education evolved into a mass system in the 1800s and into the 1900s, pure oral examination was looked at as super inefficient. A written paper could be handed in and graded without lining everyone up in front of a panel.
The oral system scales poorly. One examiner can only hear so many students in a day. There are damn good reasons Medieval universities were small and modern ones are not.
Requiring every major paper to be defended live reintroduces the bottleneck that written exams were designed to escape.
Accessibility takes a hit too. Students with speech differences, anxiety disorders, hearing impairments, or simply less fluency in the language of instruction face an extra barrier that a written submission does not impose. The written form, for all its flaws, leveled some of that ground. Shall we abandon the differently abled because machines disrupt the academic system and essentially make cheating effective? This does not seem very logical, or sensitive.
So while it’s nice that academics are rediscovering the old ways, I don’t really see this as a scalable answer to raising education levels for the masses, but more of a knee jerk way to try to bypass the obvious technological disruption by returning to non-scalable, inaccessible ways of doing things that our ancestors abandoned for a reason.
It has its place for graduate students and smaller volume education systems. It’s fine for keeping the ivory tower clean. But it’s not the answer to expanding education to everyone and taking advantage of the technological disruption to advance education and learning throughout greater humanity, which is what AI definitely possesses as a possibility.
In Hungary it's a pipeline. You go in a room, you pick a piece of paper out of a hat, which gives you some task or topic to prepare for. Then you sit down at a desk (the room is filled with about 15 students working already), then you solve the problem or sketch out your notes to present the topic you picked for like 20 minutes, then you go to the professor and you have to, in low voice, explain your solution, the professor asks back and pokes at it to make sure you understand. The professor then gives a grade immediately and you go home.
In Germany, it's usually no random pick of a topic, you just go through the entire semester's material over 30-45 minutes and the professor stops to spend more or less time on each topic to explore your knowledge. You can explain things by making sketches on paper. A PhD student sits there quietly taking notes of what was asked and what the student answers approximately. You leave the room, the prof and the PhD student discuss the performance, decide the grade and you come back, and the professor explains the grade and what you did well and not well.
Since each course needs its eval, assessment is a function of N, not N*K or K. Much easier to scale if there is ~5 evals per student per year than ~20.
I was the PhD student in the room in dozens of these exams, and I toke some of them myself. But that was for classes with a bit less than 40 to maybe 60-80 students. The load for the larger ones was shared among professors, if I remember correctly. But it was certainly the case that a single professor spent 1-2 days doing nothing else but these exams.
And it was 1 professor and 1 PhD students, and those don't count. They essentially grow on trees and are always available, if you need some.
I think education is something better scaled horizontally than vertically. More schools, with more professors instead increasing the student per professor throughput. The classes where I learned the absolute most, and had the best experience, were closer in size to 25 than 100.
The horizontal capacity is ineffectively used by having many degree mills and low-value degrees, but if we re-tooled the knowledge sets we could raise the bar.
As for the quality, I think small classrooms with good teachers probably produces a better outcome than large classrooms with great teachers.
With an oral exam, the prof blocks off 3 days or so, with ~8 students per day and it's done. It's not a huge additional effort compared to all the effort of giving the course over the full semester anyway.
An added, though minor benefit is that the professor might decide to offer a student assistant job to someone who performs well, because it's much easier to judge who is actually good in an oral exam vs in written. There's a reason that job interviews aren't just tests filled out on paper but involve personal interactions.
They are likely prone to more biases than written exams, and the variability among examiners is likely high. My experience is both in taking these exams myself, and also sitting in on them as the note taker many times. Though that was only with one specific professor, and almost always on the same course. But that was in my experience a very fair exam, even for those students that were very noticeably nervous.
The appeal of digital systems, at a social level, is that they can transmit information accurately for almost no marginal cost. They come at the risk of fraud.
With AI the levels of risk have increased. Anyone can now be a fraudster, and it gets harder and harder to prove anything online. Either of us two, in this conversation, could be a well tuned LLM.
So society, collectively and at an individual level, is forced to reassess reliance on purely digital information. Which means that the advances in the technology, actually end up reducing the utility of digital systems more generally.
You can argue that this makes education costly and less accessible. It does. It absolutely does. There is also no alternative except to see higher education get wiped out, which would have devastating economic and social effects.
So we are going back to blue books and vivas.
You don't need to do everything orally. A return to handwritten final exams done without electronic aids would help too. They can be open note as mine were in the mid 70s or even open book.
As for scalability, I really don't see the problem; if we are producing so many qualified people then we surely can use some of them to examine the next generation. It sounds like the argument that often appears on the web where someone, usually an American, claims that a solution that works in, say the UK, can't work in their country simply because their population is larger.
Also, we really should consider if shoe horning every young person into an academic institution is useful either to society or to the person concerned. It certainly has not been an unmixed success in the UK.
And that's before we get to technological changes making that sort of knowledge and those skills much less valuable.
As an aside, accessibility cuts both ways. As a person with ADHD I'd much rather do oral and practical exams.
So we’re probably going to see a split- mass production schools that still act as job training for Industrial Revolution era jobs will keep doing what they are doing. Schools that want to keep their academic prestige will implement these inefficient safeguards and raise prices accordingly. Employers will distinguish between these two types of diplomas when there are enough options out there that are combatting cheating- much like in-person schools are generally valued higher than online educations, or how certain schools (MIT, Stanford) are valued higher then others. This might lead us to the transformation of higher education many have been anticipating, because the current system cannot remain as-is. We all thought technology was the thing causing the upheaval but AI has really accelerated things.
Interestingly, you dont consider your 'inverse' point: that now the manual part of teaching the stuff can (and definitely will) be automated with LLMs.
It will become similar to coding: humans evaluate, LLMs just provide what has been mechanical for a couple hundred years
It can also be graded blindly. That allows for removing–or at least mitigating–biases in evaluation.
Universities in the US charge fortunes and pay instructors a pittance while plowing ever more money into “administrators”. Fire half the administrators and hire more instructors to both proctor exams and give more personalized instruction.
Universities are entirely elective, why would they need to cater specifically to disabilities? Driving schools don't make exceptions for the blind. There are skills that people expect you to have with a certain kind of diploma, and it reflects poorly on the school if they don't have a standard to hold people to. Not being able to present your work in a basic way is one of those mandatory skills that imo makes you unqualified to graduate if you don't grasp it.
I'm not saying you can't make an exception for a person or two who is clearly as good or better than the rest otherwise, but people will always try to misuse as many exceptions as they can, en masse, as an excuse to just avoid doing required work.
It doesn't feel good, but at some point we have to ask, can we support every single case, at the expense of the whole? I'd like to be convinced that's not a necessary tradeoff
The list of conditions that qualify for what will most likely have to be redone completely from scratch.
I'm not joking: you could have an AI quiz the students and test their understanding. That way the tests go deeper into testing the understanding by following through on the answers, and are standardized and fair for everyone. I don't think we are there yet at all but I actually think its not insane for the future. I expect downvotes though/I don't think our generation would agree with this.
What's old is new :)
Things like the Denmark approach (and/or in-person written responses) seem like a better direction. Treat take-home writing the same as we've treated take-home math questions - as useful practice (for those who choose to actually engage with it), but not a significant input to grading.
So for a dane this reads like “back to the old way”, rather than anything new or novel.
- Írásbeli (written) - standardised written exam, centrally set and marked
- Szóbeli (oral) - the panel interview
- A committee of 2-3 teachers sits as a panel
- The student draws a topic at random from a list
- They get prep time (usually 15-20 mins)
- They present their answer to the panel
- The panel asks follow-up questions and probes understandingA fun anecdote from my defense was that this element of logic "did not exist before some time" or something.
One of my citations was a book from like, the 1700's or something, and it absolutely blew away one of the committee members that I'd found it. He asked me "how on earth did you find this reference?" and I just told him that I look at all the math/logic libraries in Boston I had access to, I looked up all their logic books that predated the cut off I was looking for, and I skimmed them.
I didn't even have to leave my university's library, because one of the first five books had the counter-factual I was looking for. Sure, it was a rare book and I had read it in a special room, but it wasn't particularly hard to find.
Before that defense, I was 100% the only person alive with that information.
Written exams are also not best suited to project-based classes.
What’s the best way to grade students in classes with coding projects?
But yeah, this is a good step.
Homework is also becoming obsolete at this point. If they can't do it with pen and paper in class, there's no reliable way to evaluate work anymore.
That felt like a very natural solution to me. Of course, worst case scenario, they just blindly generate and memorize the proofs without thinking. But I think the follow ups will catch them in that case. Moreover, I choose to believe that >90% of my students are willing to at least put in the work of scrutinizing those proofs which is honestly not bad exercise in its own right.
I would love to do oral exams directly, the logistics with the number of students I have just make that hard. I know we're trialing it with the less populated special topics courses.
https://theconversation.com/mit-researchers-say-using-chatgp...
I heard instructors say all too often that it was obvious when somebody was cheating, but somehow they missed the guy paying his cousin to write the final.
Even more so these days with the infusion of identity politics in education.
Likewise, when I was a lab consultant, I felt like advising others was when the concepts of Linux/systems administration _really_ sunk in.
I always crammed the bare minimum for any kind of assessment (by the end of college I was actively avoiding any classes with final exams), but when I need to be able to teach someone else or explain my understanding in a live environment? That's when I _actually_ learn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matura#Italy
It's time consuming and nerve-wracking, but it feels fair.
When I was in school there was a maths aural test. The teacher read out questions and you wrote the answers, with no calculator. Basically a stupid name for a mental arithmetic test. The funny thing was the teachers were so at pains to differentiate between two words that sound basically the same in our local accent, aural and oral, that they insisted on pronouncing aural as "ow-eral' the ow being pronounced like a pain reaction sound. The smarter kids took to teasing the teacher with words like aura and aurora, and asking how to pronounce them...
I had no idea I was doing this until one of the teacher pointed to the heap in front of me, but it saved my bacon as I did otherwise well.
Related, I've moved to requiring regular in-class handwritten quizzes. Just a blank piece of paper to start, with the questions on the board. The practice forces students to recognize whether they are learning specific topics.
In the long run, in the AGI world, if everyone has implants, then everyone is roughly equal because computer-aided computation will be better than what any individual can do. Those without implants are screwed.
(I don't want an implant; nor do I want others to have implants.)
Even intermediate exams were a combinations of practical work in some written form and the theoretical grill sessions in the end of every semester.
All in all, if I had to put a professor’s hat today I would not give a sh.. if my students would use LLMs to write text. What would matter (and what does for me as a hiring manager at $WORK) and a human being with decency is the results of the _natural neural network_ training so to speak. IF whatever prompts and interactions with LLMs result in sharp knowledge of the subject and ability to apply the knowledge to solving real problems, well done and congrats!
If they just memorise the answer any smart teacher can trip them up by just rephrasing things or developing tangents to see understanding.
In school before exams, I'd often make little cheat sheets about things that you'd need to memorise like formulas for areas and volumes or certain physics equations (we weren't allowed any reference material for that on exams). The very act of writing them all down before the exam would often boost my memory enough to the point I'd just recall them.
When I was teaching in a university the easiest thing to test someone's understanding was a simple question: "Explain me how would you use this in a day-to-day situation."
If the guy knows his business, he'll go on a long lecture obsessing over every new feature of C# 2.0 or PHP 3. He would give you all the differences between Firefox 3.5.1 and IE 6 with Maxthon. (Goddamn I'm freaking old)
Should you not find a spark of interest but just random mumbo-jumbo of words that don't constitute sentences, you can clearly see that there is no understanding present in the subject.
In this case you work as a teacher, helping the guy to figure out what he does not understand in a subject and simplifying things for him till this clicks. After that he will be able to talk about said subject for hours with gusto.
Tangentially, the market for uni assignments (mostly humanities) for pay was huge before AI.
It is also often the case for exams in majors (they are often oral).
So nothing innovative there
I'm not going to spend my effort policing whether they're using AI or not in their class work because it's a losing battle. At the end of the day, they can either demonstrate mastery of the material at an exam or not. It makes the exams higher stakes, but that's where we are.
(Also, there should be electives, but the rigorous backbone of a degree should be mandatory, so "students won't choose this course" doesn't come up.)
Out of curiosity, which US university did you attend? I went to a well-known and highly-regarded public university in California, and they absolutely did not coddle their students. Poor-performing students regularly washed out.
Perhaps you also don't have a comprehensive picture as to what is available to students across every university in Europe. Europe, like America, is a big place and, like America, the situation probably varies by institution. As with most things, the answer is probably more nuanced than general observations would make it seem.
Which university did you attend? I asked you once already; put up or shut up.
I, my parents, my in-laws and my siblings are all academics. I don't need to prove anything to you. My brother is faculty at an ivy and literally what I am describing is what is currently going on in his department because the administration has foisted MBA brainrot "performance metrics" that are easily gamed by students and faculty who don't particularly care to teach but need points in their portfolios.
Students are entitled "I'm the customer, and I'm always right and I'm paying you a lot" twats who get the administration to bail them out if they don't get As for half-assed work. It's similar but not as bad at R1 state universities where I work and have worked.
You are completely out of touch and which university you or I attended in the 90s (two generations ago) is completely irrelevant.
Students can ask for whatever they want. It doesn’t mean they will get it, unless maybe they are VIPs at Ivy League schools, and those are a sliver of the total population of university students. Don’t mistake the minuscule minority for the majority.
You’re letting your personal experience cloud the full and diverse picture of reality. Consider that we may both be right depending on the circumstances.
The only cost of an incomplete is it doesn’t help towards a degree, but a degree is just a signaling mechanism. If you want to be able to use their degree to signal something to someone, you will have to jump through their hoops.
As AI eats up the need for half-assed "I googled a few things and wrote something up and then slacked off for five hours" white-collar-paperwork jobs, it's gonna be pretty hard for people not willing or able to demonstrate that they can do anything that couldn't just be fully done with an "agent" instead.
What is your expectation from such a class? What are you hoping to get out of it?
If you merely want a tutor that will help you out navigate a topic you are interested in, with no strings attached, then sure, yes. No need to take exams.
But if the goal is to get a formally recognized degree in some topic, then you will need to accept that there will be oversight over how you understand that topic. Because the institutions granting those degrees need to sign them off. And if they care about their reputation, they would be interested in signing off only on those students, who actually understand the topic.
So there will need to be exams. In the AI era, it is close to impossible to guarantee that a remote exam will accurately evaluate your understanding of a topic. So the exams would need to be carried out in person.
There is nothing children-specific in using such approach. It is merely one of the few still somewhat objective ways to actually test people's understanding of some topic.
If so, how would an adult be treated while still expecting them to demonstrate mastery?
If not, what do you think a reasonable expectation for an adult should be?
Sometimes I even wonder if this is the outcome of sheer laziness, fear or both.
When I speak to professors, teachers and students - It's also surprising that "top tier" institutions are fighting AI harder (outside extremely specific courses like Harvard’s flagship CS50, MBA courses at Wharton (UPenn) and MIT) while "bottom tier" institutions are completely embracing it and rebuilding their curriculum around it. One CS professor at a "bottom tier" CSU mentioned to me that he's actively going completely "open book using AI" - students are allowed to use anything they want from Claude to Codex to OpenCode to finish assignments but the assignments have now changed from "blurt out quicksort" to "let's sort N natural numbers in a cache efficient way using least amount of resources". I would hire the latter over the former anytime. I am tired of interviewing candidates who can shit out quicksort before I can even finish my sentence but stare at me dumbfounded when I ask them to sort people's name serialized in unicode.
In my opinion, the bulk of traditional education has been a mix of memorization of facts, knowing inference rules, and applying inference rules to those facts, coupled with recall.
Before the age of LLMs, only very expensive-to-build rule-based expert systems were able to replicate that functionality. Humans were just simply cheaper and way more reliable.
In 2026, Frontier models are exceedingly, across the board, across industries, breaking records and challenging those notions on cost, capability and sophistication.
Trying to replicate how education used to operate pre-frontier LLMs is like forcing people to farm by hand in the age of automated tractors that have LIDAR, Vision, RTK on board.
I'm not discounting other elements of learning like collaborative debate, clinical/lab work, Socratic reasoning, emotional intelligence and the development of a professional network - but I argue these skills are not limited to a school or university setting. Infact, a lot of this is distorted in a school or university setting compared to the real world.
I have been filing my own taxes, including complexities like equity, real estate and business income for over a decade now, so it's not just a simple 1040 and 540. Reading through IRS documentation, talking to EAs and CPAs to fill in ambiguities and gaps was pretty expensive in terms of time and money.
Both Claude Opus and GPT 5.5 now, as of 2026, answer all my tax questions correctly. Those thousands of dollars in time and money I had spent has been replaced by a single $20 subscription. Unless tax codes drastically change every year, that $20 is a one time cost.
If I were to begin my tax journey in 2026, I would never had to spend those dollars: dozens of tax professionals are out of a job - all their education is for nothing.
It's entirely irrelevant whether they passed their exams by carving answers out on granite, taking their exams in a jail cell on an island proctored by Catholic Nuns under the watchful guard of automatic machine guns manned by T-1000s, I just don't need them anymore. For my usecase, these humans and their credentials provide 0 additional value over a one-time $20 expense, no matter how complicated it was for them to get their credential and what complex interpretive dance they had to do to impress the people awarding their grades.
All this "reject AI, do it by hand" is just insanity at worst and laziness at best.
That said, I'm personally unsure what the future of education in the age of tractors is like but removing weeds, planting seeds, watering them, all by hand is certainly not it.
It's my understanding that most countries - developed or developing - are bottlenecked on educating their masses due to lack of qualified teachers.
That's a bandwidth problem. Having those teachers listen to oral arguments from a handful of students is not solving the core bandwidth problem. All these shenanigans is doing a disservice to the public.
These are important skills to develop, even in a world with LLMs.
> All this "reject AI, do it by hand" is just insanity at worst and laziness at best.
If a 3rd grader complained about having to learn multiplication because calculators exist, would you agree with them?
Why do we make kids learn how to do math if they can pull out their phone and open the calculator app? Because learning how to learn is important and there is value in understanding how the answer is produced, even if you have a machine that can produce it for you.
Universities can teach a separate class on how to use LLMs. The existing classes should be focused on teaching their existing subject matter, not becoming an extension of a how-to-LLM class
I actually appreciate this question very much because this question is extremely pertinent to our discussion. Before I continue my response, I want to turn around and ask you:
1. What's your definition of "learn how to do math"?
i. Would it be sufficient if they proved they understood what addition, subtraction, multiplication and division was? Or do they need to be able to correctly calculate what 4592 * 314 is? What if they could show you using diagrams of squares and rectangles *why* (a + b)** 2 expands to the equation it does but refused to chart out results for various values of a and b?
ii. Would you fail a student who could reliably chart out results for (a + b)** 2 given various values of a and b, but failed to explain that using diagrams of squares and rectangles?
iii. Would you fail a student who could reliably add 1 + 3 or 7 - 5 or 7 * 5 but fail to compute 4592 * 314?
iv. Is a student who could reliably add 1 + 3 or 7 - 5 or 7 * 5 but fail to compute 4592 * 314 at the age of 5 superior or inferior to a student who is capable of doing the same at age 7?
2. If an exam is composed of tables of long division and your score on the test boils down to your ability to how many of those long divisions you can complete in 45 minutes, does the person who scores the highest have a superior understanding of division than the slowest student who suffers from mental fatigue due to an underlying, undiagnoised health condition?
3. When you say "understand how the answer is produced", what level of abstraction is acceptable to be not considered as cheating? Do they need to understand how the calculator physically computes the floating-point math, or is pushing the button enough? If pushing the button is cheating, why isn't using a base-10 shortcut algorithm also cheating? What if the button pusher explained to you precisely how IEEE 754 worked, how a digital calculator works and then refused to do long division citing it was a complete waste of their time and yours? Would you refuse to let them pass the class or fail them unless they yielded to your demands and complied with your specific definition of learning?
Is the math class also doubling as ability to pass compliance and behavioral standards or is it purely a test of mathematical ability?
4. If a student uses an LLM to generate the boilerplate code for a script, but can perfectly explain the architecture, debug the logic, and scale the deployment, have they failed to 'learn how to learn' just because they didn't manually type the syntax?
Educational resources and classroom time is a zero sum game. We cannot afford to educate everyone if they all require 1:1 coaching from a qualified human in a room that has limited space. Time in a day is zero sum as well. Every minute someone spends on doing the 135th long division is a minute they're not spending thinking if solving long division problems is a meaningful differentor in their long term success - whether it's the long division that will make them wealthy, happy and successful or something else entirely?
I’m not an educator by profession but I’ve done a lot of training and mentoring.
There is no replacement for actually doing the work. People who study something but don’t go through the exercises feel they understand topics better than they do. It’s only when they are put in a position where they have to apply it that the cracks in their understanding are revealed.
This would 100% result in students who thought they could explain multiplication but only had a surface level idea. The knowledge would also be fleeting because actually doing the thing makes the knowledge stick more than just observing and understanding the thing.
So yes, you still need to have the students do the thing.
Replace math with writing and it will be more obvious. It’s easy to look at someone’s writing and critique it. It’s much harder to write well without practicing.
In e.g., philosophy, allowing students to write their assessments with the help of LLMs changes the students’ depth of understanding, as well as their ability to synthesize, formalize, and drum up their own arguments and objections.
These are all useful skills, even in a post-LLM world.
indeed but LLMs improve these capabilities. Let me explain:
Most educators behave as if using an LLM robs the student of their ability to think. That has not and never been my experience.
You can just tell an LLM to debate, find out inconsistencies and issues in your writing, and challenge you, and it will very well do that!
LLMs for me, cheaply replace teachers who can barely be accessed during office hours because they are so busy doing research or overwhelmed with grading coursework.
In a typical educational setup, I might have half an hour at best with a teacher who looks kindly upon me, and at worst, five minutes with a teacher who doesn't like being around me. An LLM has no emotion, but it has knowledge, it has inference rules, and it has the ability to push back, debate, and find out inconsistencies, bugs and gaps in my thinking.
Behavior that is exactly what I need consistently, in a good teacher.
A frontier LLM is a good teacher who doesn't play games, has no emotion, infinite patience and always available for $20/mo.
There are two kinds of engineers in Finland. Some received a more theoretical education at research universities. Most went to more applied institutions that focus more on practical skills. Regardless of what employers say, they generally prefer the theoretical engineers from research universities. Because the higher status of those universities attracts more talented individuals, because theoretical understanding tends to stay valid longer than practical skills, and because it's easier to learn practical skills at work.
The kids who start their studies today are supposed to graduate in 2030, and they will probably retire around 2080. Focusing too much on the skills their early employers might want in the 2030s would be a huge misallocation of resources.
depends. If you're building a datacenter and need welders to weld two very specific set of metals together, allocating a PhD in metallurgy to do that welding, I argue would be a huge misallocation of resources.
Now your argument seems to be whether the PhD in metallurgy can pivot to doing something else entirely compared to someone who has been narrowly trained to only weld two very specific set of metals together.
If I interpret your take on the matter, your point seems to be that the former is "intellectually superior and more flexible" than the latter.
I dont take that position - I find most humans to be extremely capable. Just because one human was able to grasp the intricacies of metallurgy doesn't necessarily imply they have more capability than someone who didn't.
The fact that employers in Finland can be so very picky says more about the productivity of Finland than the employee's capabilities. At peak productivity, Finland would just not be hiring anyone who could breathe but import labor because there's not enough people in Finland.
First, employers favor applicants from prestigious schools over those from less prestigious schools, because prestigious schools are more selective. That seems to be at least as true in the US as in Finland.
Second, theoretical education is more useful in the long term, because it's a better foundation for learning new skills. It can be a disadvantage when you are trying to get your first job, as you have fewer practical skills potential employers would need right now. Which is why, from an individual perspective, theoretical education only makes sense in higher-tier institutions, where the prestige can offset the initial disadvantage.
I will repeat what I said - if an employer arbitrarily restricts their talent pool to legacy credentials, they are optimizing for signaling rather than raw productivity.
By 2026, there is overwhelming anecdote and evidence that credentials and where you went to school have very little to do with demonstrated performance. (See citations 1-3)
Hence, it's mostly theatrics.
It seems like you're arguing that it's safer to attend prestigious schools because that increases your chances of being employed. I argue that in the age of LLMs, where the cost of learning is very low and speed of building prototypes (and hence learning and improvement) is rapid, it's easier than ever to start your own business.
> First, employers favor applicants from prestigious schools over those from less prestigious schools, because prestigious schools are more selective. That seems to be at least as true in the US as in Finland
This represents a trailing-indicator mindset typical of "MNC".
Yes, legacy corporations still filter by prestige because they want to signal to others they hire only the best, but that's because in extremely large orgs like theirs, it's impossible for a single person's contributions (outside the C-Suite) to have an outsized effect on that org, so they resort to proxy metrics, like credentails, for signalling.
In real life though, credentials have an extremely weak correlation with impact (see citations).
What this translates for an end user, is that the end user doesn't care about the credentials of the person who built the product. I explain that below.
On the frontiers of excellence - startup founders will tell you that hiring people from prestigious schools is a liability over those who might only have a high school degree because the prestigious school graduate is entitled and is looking to build a resume so they can jump ship in 2 years instead of the barely high school degree student who's hungry to prove they are worth investing in.
The selectivity of prestigious schools is gamed heavily in the U.S where you have literally floors of "prep schools" full of trainers telling you which piano lessons to take, which tennis tournaments to play at, which charities to volunteer for and which SAT question types to learn well. Getting into Harvard is less about ability and more about checking off boxes on a checklist.
Notice that absolutely none of this actually has to do with what the student actually wants to do in life and everything to do with impressing the gatekeepers to admissions.
However, make no mistake, the end customer rarely cares about the credentials.
When you watch Netflix or play the XBox, I bet you don't look up the credentials of the production team or the engineers who built it - you enjoy the content and vote with your dollars - and that's real life.
HN is full of people who don't have anything past a high-school degree but they were obsessed with solving one problem well and now they are multi-millionaires and billionaires because they ended up having an outsized impact. There are far more in that bucket who are comfortable but not multi-millionaires (so you never hear about them).
The money is not the end result but proof of impact and this proves my point.
Let's even discard that, citing survivorship bias. Let's reduce my argument to one fact: engineering/code doesn't care about the author's pedigree - all that matters is whether the system compiles, works correctly and scales under load and a prestigious university certainly doesn't have exclusive rights to those skills.
> theoretical education only makes sense in higher-tier institutions, where the prestige can offset the initial disadvantage
That doesn't make any sense. An institution will hire as per their needs: higher-tier, lower-tier, mid-tier all have their unique needs.
The reason why higher-tier institutions can afford to hire advanced degree graduates is because lower-tier, mid-tier simply cannot afford that baggage: highly credentialed individuals often won't work on tasks they consider "beneath them", the actual "plumbing" of engineering, which makes them useless to lean, high-velocity teams - which is precisely the point the founders at start ups make.
I think you're conflating multiple issues together altough you're not alone in the population that strongly advocates for education as a proxy for ability. They have nothing to do with each other and have a lose correlation.
Here's a thought experiment:
- Kid A (Rural Finland): Has internet access, a Claude Code subscription, and a singular obsession. They spend their time learning how to write a provably correct, memory-safe OS kernel. Through sheer, unhindered iteration and thousands of failures, they master thread management, hardware concurrency, durable scheduling, and modern CPU architecture.
- Kid B (New York City): Attends a prestigious prep school. Their entire mental bandwidth is consumed by a generalized conveyor belt: memorizing 100 years of Eupropean and U.S. history, computing the molality of an acid drop, identifying stereocenters in organic chemistry, and writing essays on what Socrates said to Glaucon. They barely touch operating systems because there is no time left after juggling DBMS trivia, analog design, and quantum physics to satisfy a rubric.
Which person would you listen to or hire when it comes to building an OS?
Now your argument might then pivot to "but what if instead of building an OS, I wanted someone to do algoritmic trading on Wall Street? Ha! I got you there! Kid A knows nothing about that, they only know how to write a kernel!"
Kid A doesn't care. Their singular obsession is OSes and they are world class at it. Their brains aren't clouded by molality and stereocenters - an OS kernel certainly doesn't care about them. If in the future, we had a CPU that worked off organic chemistry, maybe he will learn about it or maybe not and there will be Kid C in the unlikely case Kid A failed to build a trading engine from scratch, fail 1000 times, and learn the math on the fly just like they did for the kernel.
---
[1] Google's Internal Data (Laszlo Bock): In 2013, Google's SVP of People Operations publicly revealed that GPAs, test scores, and university prestige had zero correlation with employee success. They explicitly began hiring more candidates with no college degrees because work-sample tests were far better predictors of impact.
[2] The Dale & Krueger Study (NBER): A famous National Bureau of Economic Research study found that students who were accepted to Ivy League schools but chose to attend less prestigious state schools earned just as much money later in life. It proved that the ambition of the student drives success, not the prestige of the institution.
[3] The Schmidt & Hunter Meta-Analysis: The gold standard in industrial psychology (examining 85 years of hiring data) found that "years of education" has a dismal 0.10 correlation with job performance, whereas "work sample tests" and "cognitive ability" are highly predictive.
That's what education in a research university is like, when you actually take advantage of it. You don't have to focus on whatever seems useful and practical in the short term, you don't have to compete against your peers, and you don't have to overwork yourself. Instead, you have a socially acceptable opportunity to study whatever interests you, and you hopefully gain the attitude that you can learn whatever you need to learn.
They all have a lower population than Denmark.
All but six states (CA, TX, FL, NY, PA, IL) have less than double the population of Denmark.
For the same reason a lot of universities in Europe require you to take philosophy. It's completely unrelated to C++ or data-structures, but it adds to your acumen as a whole.
Not that different from some universities that require you to be able to swim[0].
Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....
Today: adult with no problems doing public speaking in front of hundreds.
What fixed me: more public speaking and not having the option of avoiding the task.
I still don't really like it but I also realised that dragons don't appear from portals and eat you immediately if you do it.
My missus is much like I was but she never got through it, she finds it fascinating that I can.
I was good at it because I sold the customer what they needed vs what the company wanted me to sell them, it actually led to the same customers coming back and asking for me by name and I got offered a job by one of them - I do wonder what my life would have been like had I taken it but it also led to my entire career as well, my first consulting gig came off the back of a conversation with a customer about a quote they'd had for some development and with the hubris of youth I said I could do that way cheaper (I could and I did, found out later how much cheaper and kicked myself, also a valuable lesson - You don't get paid for your effort, you get paid to save them money, if you are saving them a lot of money you can charge a lot of money).
Was never going to be my career and didn't pay particularly well so I wasn't too concerned about what management thought long term.
What also helped me is being so knowledgeable about the topic that I didn't need to prepare the presentation much (except for the slides and the general plan). When you know what you have to talk about, it becomes a lot more natural and relaxed for me.
I would be a lot more stressed if I had to learn a presentation by heart and it would probably be a robotic delivery.
So I did quite a few "surprise" presentations, with very light prepared material and a topic I cared about. Got me the practice I needed and I learned not to get "stuck" as if I forgot the next sentence. The presentation always flows!
Now, I have a talk at a major conference, and I'm afraid this won't work there, so I'll prepare my talk better this time, maybe even have speaker notes!
1. Actually being very knowledgeable about the subject in question, to the extent that I can offer facts or well-reasoned opinion on the topic on essentially any reasonable question. In other words, not being a junior high school student asked to do a 15 minute speech on a topic drawn from a hat.
2. Not having the idea that the audience expects a correct and immediate answer to every possible question.
3. Not doing every single speech literally in front of 15% of my entire peer group, including all my friends, all the people I admired, and all the people who treated me poorly.
I still hate doing Zoom calls without slides or a screen to share because I can't stand having 20 people staring intently at me. It's just distracting. But otherwise I have no problem at all talking for hours on a topic I know well.
Doing a presentation on Zoom seems kind of pointless as you lose the connection to the audience. I'd rather just assign a pre-record to watch and do a live Q&A later on. More like a Lecture+Tutorial format.
I run into this in the military too. "The person to do the ethics/roe/safety/drugs/mental health brief just called in sick. Two hundred soldiers will be here at 0800 tomorrow. Read fast."
Yup, that's the cure. Worked for me, too.
That’s why exposure therapy with an anxiety ladder is important
The teacher started off with "you're all going to look like idiots and embarrass yourselves, and you'll have to get over it. Best you do it here now rather than in front of coworkers in a few years. She gave us skills and techniques that I still rely on today, and most importantly, the opportunity to practice.
I was a introverted going in to college, and that class didn't turn my into an extroverted social butterfly in 4 months. However, I have never been paralyzed with fear when required to talk in front of a crowd, and that has been invaluable in my career.
Like every time I hear "Oh I'm just not a math person." It's not that I expect everyone to like math because I do, not at all. But I do expect people to not artificially limit themselves. :/
However, the only way out is through. I confidently speak in front of 100’s regularly. I can pick up the damn phone (still a twinge of anxiety, but nothing like it was). The cure that works just seems to be “do it until it’s mundane”.
As an aside, it’s vital from the career perspective. You can’t let fear, no matter how extreme it feels, stop you. It’s a terrible cliche, but still true “no courage without fear”.
as a side note, "woe betide you" roughly means "you're in for a very bad time", not "I feel sorry for you".
I was pointing it out because the first comment I was replying to was clearly unpacking the word "woe" from the phrase "woe betide" and I figured they would appreciate the linguistic footnote.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.70031
https://www.thecrimson.com/column/a-night-at-the-symphony/ar...
Depending on your role this number can be much higher.
I'd say "get over it", because this is simply a fact of life and you'll have to talk to and present in front of a group of people at some point, perhaps regularly too.
I take my meds so that my heart does not explode from talking to a person. So yeah at some point, deal with it.
The oral exam format described is also somewhat unusual, in my experience. It is usually the case that there is one internal examiner and one external examiner in the room. More than that would be ruinously expensive. The format varies; usually it's a combination of a short presentation and questions asked by the examiner. Drawing a random topic is very common.
Source: I am a university teacher in Denmark who teaches master-level courses without oral exams, and I have been an examiner for many oral exams at university level.
The professors at my grad school had a very amazing tact to get through this as well. They had enough time for specific students who they knew struggled with such issues during the mid semester orals and then had an amazing way of getting answers from them even in the discomfort.
It is amazing how much can be done with soft talking, slow progression and pauses in between from professors who care.
True but maybe a blessing in disguise. As a shy college kid once (although not with any real disability), being forced to get up in front of people helped me get over it. And I was 10x better after a semester of teaching during a break in my career.
Whether it succeeds in that goal is a separate topic.
Corruption affected history or economics because it was ideologically relevant to authorities but math and physics proceeded on its own.
This is also an absolutely great way to ensure the participants really understand what they’re saying, even aside from ai-related concerns. You could always pull definitions straight from textbooks, and write something which mostly makes sense but that you don’t really understand. But you really can’t teach something unless you do understand it, imo. The best command I ever got on a topic was due to TA’ing
The professor (strict uncompromising man hated by most of the class) then remarked, "now I see you really figured it out".
That's not my experience. Standing in front of somebody who's been your teacher and you might look up to is way scarier than some rando.
If you're blind, you won't be a racing driver, that's just how it is.
Thesis/dissertations do have to be defended, but for course assessment that is not a given.
(I run a course and teach as well on other Master programmes.)
I do this at work too. When doing code review i actually do mostly listening and then some questions. If the developer can teach me the code and i understand what they're doing and why then it's usually pretty good code already.
I can see this being a problem in the US when it comes to "accommodations" in general. Students with an ADHD diagnosis can claim it causes just about any difficulty and get accommodations for it. The local (top ranked, but everyone's seen all the stories coming out of the Ivies...) college here gives students with ADHD double time on exams and has them take it in a special disabilities proctoring center where it's a struggle to get the staff there to even enforce those time limits. Obviously this also makes it infinitely easier to outright cheat as well.
Not a chance you will get past the "my ADHD makes it hard for me to think about these things verbally" challenge at institutions like this.
I have no idea why you'd want to be taking a test a second longer than you already have to.
Either you know the material or you don't, anything taking a lot of time is borderline stuff where you're scrapping for points you might not deserve in the first place lol
The theory was that ADHD students have trouble sustaining concentration, so extra time allows for thought breaks and distractions. The idea was that 2 hours for the ADHD student would be similar to 1 hour of concentration for a non-ADHD student, and therefore the inequity had been partially compensated.
The teachers I know have the same observation that you do: The extra test time isn’t usually used by the ADHD students, but when other students (or maybe more accurately, parents) discover that extra test time was available, most of the high performing students suddenly got diagnosed with ADHD at the same time. They were the ones staying extra long to proofread their work.
For the elementary/junior high teachers I know the schools’ solution was to give everyone the same extended test taking time. Easiest way to remove the incentive to seek out a fake diagnosis without taking anything away from anyone.
It is most clear when there is some kind of problem solving involved. An extra 30 min to figure out the trick or plan a detailed approach is a real benefit.
The other case is where there’s some missing knowledge but with a bunch of extra effort you can figure out how to do it. That would be something like re-constructing a self-balancing binary tree from some half-remembered lecture notes.
Standard diagnostic questionnaires commonly reference this. The last part of your comment reflects a lack of understanding of both human cognition and recall and ADHD in particular.
After I got treated, I understand why.
Too look for mistakes. Now I don't understand why people don't take the maximum alloted time
Problems with test-taking varied, but common issues were getting distracted by extraneous stimuli in "regular" classrooms. Frequently ADHD students were slow readers and really did need/use extra time. But the biggest problem was test-taking anxiety, often quite prominent, contributing to difficulty with tests.
Interestingly, more than not ADHD students were reluctant to ask for accommodations. Some never availed themselves of this benefit. Others only used part of the options they could use.
In my practice were a number of ADHD adults admitted to nursing school, some having serious academic difficulties and eventually asking for accommodations. The assistance was effective. Notably, none of these student-patients failed or dropped out, all graduated. A pleasant footnote to add is a subset of these nurses developed exceptional skill earning them leadership positions in their institutions.
Reputable clinicians wouldn't give an ADHD diagnosis or support academic accommodations without sufficient clinical evidence.
Not a school I'd be tempted to apply to. Scholastic competition is one thing, but scrapping for every conceivable speck of "I'm better than the next guy" is not a bit attractive. I wonder about the campus atmosphere. Seems likely contesting would be a hard to break habit. I feel tense just thinking about it :/
Of course, ADHD students are less likely to achieve near-perfect grades than non-ADHD peers. Though it's not impossible for an ADHD student to succeed. Anyway, not at all uncommon for a student to do very well until subjects become more complex and challenging. Conceivably a student could look promising, but then suddenly have great difficulty keeping up.
So a safe bet that at least a few students at the top-level school have ADHD. If the school offers little or no accommodation, affected students probably have to accept getting educated elsewhere. Fortunately, more than not ADHD treatment is effective, a favorable response can make a pivotal difference in the student's outcome.
No offence, but this is a ridiculous thing to get worked up about. Various neurological conditions exhibit in people just being “slow” in exams. No one ever diagnosed me with anything (probably too long ago), but teachers somehow understood that I was one of these and gave me extra time on exams.
I didn’t want it (who wants to be in an exam a minute longer than required!). But I did need it through high school. In university I was able to complete in time (mostly); I suspect because I had practiced doing exams so much by then that I’d figured out how to optimise for time (maybe everyone knows this and I was just very slow to learn it?).
I’m someone who excelled academically, and it was an important part of my identity at that time. And I do remember exams (before teachers gave me more time) where I’d get a lower grade as I’d only completed 70%. It was incredibly painful; I knew the material, if only I could get it down on paper in time! (I’ve also been an incredibly slow writer). Extra time for someone who struggles to complete on time isn’t cheating - it’s allowing people to demonstrate what they can do.
Are you sure your parents weren't involved in the background?
> Extra time for someone who struggles to complete on time isn’t cheating - it’s allowing people to demonstrate what they can do.
For me it becomes cheating when its no longer allowed to be mentioned on the certificate that extra time was given.