"I decided we would do an oral exam* because it's a great way to see if people have actually learned anything from my course and aren't just parroting notes. Because I can ask them to elaborate on their answers."
Yeah and it's also a great way to get otherwise good students to go blank because it isn't possible to absorb every bit of complex information you spent 12 weeks rushing through, Barbara.
This "gotcha" style teaching fucking pisses me off. There is no time in the real world people are not going to be able to look up their notes. Fuck, half the time I'll ask a professor something and they'll be like "I'll have to look that up later and get back to you." Why? BECAUSE THEY'RE HUMAN AND THATS HOW BRAINS ARE.
This type of teaching only favours students that already had experience with the subject beforehand and freaks with amazing memories. This kind of understanding of the material only comes from experience and repetition, something that the traditional 12 weeks of rushed lectures/labs that discard each topic quickly to fit all of them in don't do.
I fucking hate how much I am going into debt to be taught only the vaguest concepts but doing most of the teaching myself in my own time. Education under capitalism is a joke.
*An oral exam is an exam where instead of answering questions in a quiet room on paper, you have to answer questions on a live video call with your instructor.
I’m gonna recommend you check out a series published in Naked Capitalism called What If Medicine Were Taught Like a Science. It’s written by a microbiologist who has taught at medical schools for decades. Organic chemistry isn’t harder to understand than inorganic, we just teach it poorly so it acts as a filter class.
Cuba shows that we could create as many doctors as teachers each year, we just choose not to in order to artificially inflate their wages.
At the end of the day the core issue is the profit motive.
So long as education is gatekept to prevent social mobility, and doctors have a vested interest in keeping their numbers low and their salary high, we will have these issues.
Especially as college costs continue to go up.