While there's something to be salvaged from your idea (I was amazed when some of my expensive courses were taught by a TA, and one we couldn't even understand), unis aren't just vocational schools.
One of the most important classes I took during my engineering degree was a philosophy 101 course I procrastinated until my last semester. 11 years later I somehow still periodically get to talk about Callicles (from Gorgias) with a stranger at a bar—it's happened twice—, and it's generally awakened me to reading philosophy, something I assumed was dull and impenetrable.
I have no idea how any of that could be measured on a standardized test, and it would be a shame if it was dropped from curriculum just because it can't easily be measured.
Uni is more than a vocational school that prepares us for the work camp.
That's great. You should be able to take those classes if you want to.
Near-as-makes-no-difference half of the classes I was required to take in university -- my upper- and lower-division "general education" -- were an absolute waste of time for which I was forced to pay.
Even if I was forced to spend that money, I would have been better served by pretty much any other experience that carried an equivalent cost -- like spending a year backpacking in Europe and Asia.
Sure, and I have plenty of grievances myself. My expensive university calculus and physics courses were so bad (a rushed professor and TAs we couldn't understand) that we would meet up after the course to watch Youtube videos to learn the subject and do the homework. We'd joke after class, "yeah, that was definitely worth $X,XXX" with a tear in our eye.
Ended up taking a $120 summer course at a community college and mastered the subjects.
I spent a lot of time in uni wishing I was spending that time backpacking around Asia. But I also experienced the woes of standardized tests in high school and I'm reluctant to see them as a solution to anything.
How would you do it? There isn't some generic "philosophy" curriculum. The works you study in such a course, including literature and the other arts, are arbitrary.
Either the test's philosophy section chases down so many long-tails that you get most of them wrong just to get one right, or the entirety of your philosophy experience comes down to a few topical questions on a test that just miss the topics your courses covered.
That's the curse of standardized tests and why they ultimately shrink the possible curricula to fit inside of them. Is it the students that really benefit from this? Or are they the ones that suffer from our attempts at making things measurable?
> The works you study in such a course, including literature and the other arts, are arbitrary.
Not really. It's like any field of study. If you have N-many hundreds of hours in which to teach undergraduate-level math, ultimately you just have to pick the topics you think are most appropriate/beneficial. Same if you're teaching history, or graphic design, or engineering, or philosophy.
I don't see that it's particularly difficult to assess a student's grasp of philosophy. You can just ask exam questions to assess their understanding, and/or use long-form essays. Undergraduate philosophy courses seem to manage this ok. It's not like assessing an art project, which is inherently very subjective.
One of the most important classes I took during my engineering degree was a philosophy 101 course I procrastinated until my last semester. 11 years later I somehow still periodically get to talk about Callicles (from Gorgias) with a stranger at a bar—it's happened twice—, and it's generally awakened me to reading philosophy, something I assumed was dull and impenetrable.
I have no idea how any of that could be measured on a standardized test, and it would be a shame if it was dropped from curriculum just because it can't easily be measured.
Uni is more than a vocational school that prepares us for the work camp.