There is a conflict at the heart of higher education: we are rewarded for teaching students and graduating them, but trusted to uphold standards that may require us to fail them. The institution selling the course also decides whether the customer has earned the certificate.
Universities select students, enrol them in classes, and certify the result, and confuse success at one activity with success at the others.
Selecting
Do we really think firms hire Harvard graduates because of what they were taught in Cambridge rather than who was selected in the first place? Harvard has already done a screening exercise for the employer. So long as a student can comply sufficiently with the university system, they are awarded a degree four years later. That degree carries the screening information even before we ask what happened in the classroom.
Universities and their associated admission processes are designed to sort prospective students into the best institution they can attain, subject to constraints of money, geography, admissions, and everything else. Then we rank the institutions using the outcomes of the people they selected.
A university can admit excellent students, who applied because of the university’s historically accumulated reputation, and graduate excellent students without having added very much.
Another can do a great deal for students who arrived less prepared and still look worse in the rankings.
Teaching
We can document that teaching took place. Classes were taught, assignments marked, rubrics applied, student surveys completed.1 There are Canvas engagement snapshots and peer observation notes. The file is complete.
Accreditation adds its own bureaucracy. We map assessments to learning outcomes, learning outcomes to graduate attributes, and assemble reports showing that the mappings have been reviewed. External reviewers examine the evidence. We demonstrate that we have processes for assuring ourselves that students have learned.
But an accredited course is not an independently examined graduate. Reviewing our assessments and marking practices still leaves the question of what graduates retain and can do without our prompts, rubrics, and rehearsed problems. The rubric may focus the student and the instructor on more specific knowledge at the expense of the general, or other specific knowledge not previously disentangled. By over-reliance on standards, we are treating education as if it were an industrial process, rather than a bespoke set of interactions that shape individual brains.
How much of the effort spent documenting that we assess learning could go into finding out what actually survives? We have made the assurance of learning into a substantial administrative activity. We should demand evidence that the assurance itself is worth the work, we do more now than 30 years ago, but can’t show graduates are better.
What did the students learn? What do graduates still know a few years later? Can they think better? These are the actual outcomes. They are not explicitly assessed. We may know where our graduates are. We already follow graduates into employment and track their salaries. We can ask about retained learning too. A salary and an understanding of a subject are different outcomes. The rest, our assessment of teaching, is paperwork about the process.
Certifying
A passing grade records achievement at the time of assessment. Those assessments are developed by the instructors themselves. An assessment does not establish that the knowledge was retained, or that the student can use it when the problem looks different. We make a considerable leap from completing the course to having acquired an education.
A rank records relative position, not an absolute standard. Somebody has to finish last. They need not be incompetent. Somebody has to finish first. They need not be competent.
Would you cross a bridge designed by the best student in a class where nobody understood structural mechanics?
The student wants to pass. The university wants the student to remain enrolled and complete. Our officials celebrate higher passing rates. Society wants the qualification to mean something.
When those interests diverge, whom do we serve: the customer, or the society subsidising the education and relying on its standards? This arrangement deserves more scrutiny than it gets.
Assess the achievement
Society should demand the separation of teaching from at least some of the assessment.
An independent assessment should ask whether the student can do what the qualification promises. Where they learned it should be a different question. If they learned from books, work, or another teacher, the knowledge is still knowledge, the capability exists.
This would also make the teaching itself easier to evaluate. Establish what students can do when they enter. Examine what they can do when upon exit. Follow up with a sample later and find out what survived.
For example, give them a problem they have not rehearsed and require them to explain it orally. An engineer should be able to reason through a design, identify what could go wrong, and defend the assumptions. We should be interested in the student’s understanding as well as the submitted document.2
The problem is that accreditation locks in old knowledge. New material must displace the old, not just accumulate. What makes a good transport engineer in 2026 should be different from what was standard when I was a student.
But independent of the specific curriculum, the point here is to establish what the test-taker knows and can do. Comparing that with what they knew on entry gives us evidence about what the education added. We should not assume the conclusion before doing the assessment. That would not survive the most basic academic peer review.
And the lectures?
If you had asked me in the 1450s about Gutenberg’s printing press, I would have thought it sufficient to decimate traditional higher education. Once you know how to read, why do you need lectures?
Demonstrations, discussions, tutoring, laboratory experiments, sure. But lectures? The oral tradition should have fallen by the wayside centuries ago.
Will AI finally do what the printing press did not? I mean, who knows? Are universities on a long slow decline, or are we operating in the world of cartoon physics?
Big rubric has been growing in size, I am unclear why it keeps getting fed. It is the appearance of fairness and efficiency I suppose, powered by the rubric-industrial complex (e.g. https://community.instructure.com/en/kb/articles/661102-how-do-i-add-a-rubric-to-an-assignment)
In the US, Engineers (mostly Civil Engineers) sit the Fundamentals of Engineering exam around graduation and the Principles and Practice exam (and if passing become Professional Engineers) after about four years of work. NCEES writes and scores both. The university that taught the candidate does not. Neither exam is required to work as an engineer: the industrial exemption lets a company do its own in-house engineering unsealed. The licence is required to offer services to the public and to stamp drawings.
The bar exam is required to practise law in almost every state. Wisconsin admits graduates of its two law schools without it, and Oregon, Washington, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and New Mexico have built supervised-practice or portfolio routes.
Medicine examines most. USMLE Steps 1, 2, and 3 run from the second year of medical school into the first years of residency. After residency comes specialty board certification, a separate examination by one of the 24 ABMS member boards, and then continuing certification for the rest of a career.
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