Firstly, I sympathise that teaching seems to be awful. I think a lot of the problems are misaligned incentives (universities are judged by their research output; it is hard to have a career as an excellent teacher rather than an excellent researcher)

But I worry that the argument has strayed too far from one based on Chesterton’s fence to one with a lot of status quo bias and rationalisation. I say this because my university (outside the United States) followed a system much like the one the author is arguing against.

- Almost all of the degree was determined by a final exam. In fact there wasn’t even a final grade for the degree but one for each year and the convention was to take your final-year grade so in some sense only the final exam mattered (you might be expelled or advised to transfer to another course/university if you did particularly poorly in earlier exams). However, there were no resits.

- There was homework but it was not graded (at least for my subject. Your individual questions would be marked as right/wrong and problems would be pointed out)

- Attendance to lectures was not required however one had to spend a certain reasonable number of nights at the university (for a particular definition of ‘at’ and ‘university’) in order to graduate.

- Attendance to lectures was strongly encouraged (because you would struggle to get notes/homework without attendance as ~everything was handwritten or on physical paper)

- Attempting homework was strongly encouraged because you would go to small (one on one or one on two) group teaching sessions to discuss it, so there was social pressure to not be (extremely conspicuously) absent and to have something to discuss
Let me now briefly discuss how this alternative system addressed some of the author’s points.

- Preparing for exams by doing homework (and also a ‘homework’ set of example exam questions) was incentivised by the social pressure of it being very obvious if you didn’t do the work

- The homework system also addressed the problems of asking questions being scary in a big group and the (not discussed) system where lots of students in the US don’t realise that they are meant to seek out help in office hours (and worse, I understand this is a particular problem for poorer students who are less likely to know that unlike high school you aren’t meant to touch it out alone)

- Because homework wasn’t graded, some questions would be very difficult (because attempts and discussion could be interesting) or chosen for the pedagogical value. Looking at homework offered good opportunities for feedback

- Converting examinations to grades was complicated (you would get regular partial credit marks plus two different kinds of bonus mark for different levels of significant progress on a question which got outsize rewards to encourage doing fewer questions well over having a crack at more questions; there was a vector which you could dot with your vector of the three marks to get an ‘overall mark’) and borderline candidates would have their submitted answers carefully reviewed by the examination committee to allow for more fair subjective grading

- The university didn’t really offer many opportunities to appeal which reduced the pressure on teachers but has its own problems. There were some rare allowances for extenuating circumstances but in general it was encouraged to not start exams if there were serious complications (eg some health problem) and to wait a year, which was also a problematic system.

- But they did try to be particularly fair to students, e.g. they would collect the rubbish paper after the exams and if some student claimed that they had answered a question for which no answer had been submitted, the bins would be searched

- Cheating was relatively difficult as there was only one big opportunity for it: the final exams of which there were four (to allow for more time and averaging out a several days) which contained questions from all courses. More could be invested in invigilation for these few exams.

That doesn’t mean the system was without complaints. The big complaints were (1) pressure, which was slightly mitigated by the selection procedures of the university somewhat selecting students who were able to handle big exams; (2) unfairness with regards to poor performance during the exam week for random reasons (e.g. injury/personal circumstances/mild illness like a bad cold); (3) different standards for different courses, particularly a divide between pure and applied and harder courses tending to have easier questions; (4) The university is selective and many students felt that they could have gotten a higher grade by going to a less selective university, and many students felt their future would depend on the grade and not the institution next to it (many companies claimed to have ‘institution blind’ hiring for example) and therefore the university was unfairly damaging students’ career prospects with their desire to grade students based on how much they might be allowed to continue education/research at the university.