Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spitballing here, but maybe exams need to be reconsidered. What if instead, the professor has a 1:1 conversation with each student, Socrates-style? You’d know pretty quickly whether or not the student was familiar with the material, and if not, where they were weak and needed more focus. Maybe systematizing everything about education is the wrong approach.
I had class where the final exam was indeed a socratic style oral. It was for an ancient philosophy class (300 or 400 level - this was well beyond the 101 level) where we had studied Socrates (the dialog was on platonic forms). The exam was a 2:1 and lasted an hour if I recall correctly. For a class of 30, this took the professor 15 hours (three hours a day over the course of a week) to have all of the students go th…
It's not scalable, and it's way too open to professor bias.
Except for in some niche seminar classes, it's a non-starter.