Why Are School Exams Such Bad Stand-ins?

David Deutsch says education is judged by how well and how accurately you fill the bucket. Knowledge is the fluid, and by definition transferring it counts as success. Nothing can be wrong with the fluid, because the fluid is knowledge.

When something goes wrong, which it nearly always does, the conclusion is that the bucket is leaky or did not want to receive the fluid. Success is measured by exam results. In the arms race that follows in situations that are not rational, the incentive is to spend more and more time meeting the criterion and less and less time on things that cannot be measured, which are the important things. Chess shows the split. You can measure how good a grandmaster is, but there is no criterion for explaining, teaching, or giving a running commentary, and no way to claim 93% on an explaining-your-moves test. Everything important in education is of that type, not the testable type. Deutsch sets aside work where executing the criterion perfectly is the task, like being an airline pilot. An airline pilot who does not know what the controls do is not going to be a good airline pilot. Understanding is extremely important. Deutsch says it may not be as important as operating the controls, but it is extremely important. School and most university courses are different. The course and the exam are designed as proxies for the thing you actually want, and they are very poor proxies. They count as proxies only because people who really want to do the thing are willing to waste their time learning to pass the criterion.