Collaboration, independent work, etc. are very valuable and are needed.
Supervised tests also have a role to play.
It costs a lot to have an expert grade an entire project.
Tests can be standardized, giving comparable results across ten thousand people. I don’t know if 10,000 people could be useful asked to, for example, develop a PHP email webapp as their trial project without many versions of the solution leaked into the Internet.
Supervised tests minimize the opportunity for cheating.
If someone does a team project, then even if they did do their share, you don’t know what specific skills they have.
Studies of whether such tests correlate with other success metrics show that they do.
Except for a tiny minority of hot-shots (too few to support a business, and they generally find their way in life anyway), the type of independent project that most people are capable of is too trivial to give insight into their abilities.
My primary question then is this: are these shortcomings enough that such a model should completely leave our consideration as an alternative?
My goal with this is to provide choice to employers and ambitious people, and the projects would be things the corporations want to achieve, don’t mind sharing the results of with everyone (think more along the lines of a practical dissertation) and would normally be able to ahieve themselves (and possibly already have a rubric for grading results as these projects must be a normal part of the functioning of such businesses) but do not wish to invest more resources and miss out on discovering new talent simply for a more immediate, guaranteed return on investment.
Also, why not make projects interdisciplinary? The sort of rigorous documentation used for scientific studies could be adapted to the method by which students would be able to make notes and regular progress reports. Additionally, encouraging artists or multimedia focused individuals to make visual or audio documentation of their progress engages more fields in the process and encourages interdisciplinary networking.
I think this idea may be contingent on the development of a much more far-reaching change in the education or possibly corporate models in order to function in the real world, but there are many potential benefits I can see to this.
Collaboration, independent work, etc. are very valuable and are needed.
Supervised tests also have a role to play.
It costs a lot to have an expert grade an entire project.
Tests can be standardized, giving comparable results across ten thousand people. I don’t know if 10,000 people could be useful asked to, for example, develop a PHP email webapp as their trial project without many versions of the solution leaked into the Internet.
Supervised tests minimize the opportunity for cheating.
If someone does a team project, then even if they did do their share, you don’t know what specific skills they have.
Studies of whether such tests correlate with other success metrics show that they do.
Except for a tiny minority of hot-shots (too few to support a business, and they generally find their way in life anyway), the type of independent project that most people are capable of is too trivial to give insight into their abilities.
My primary question then is this: are these shortcomings enough that such a model should completely leave our consideration as an alternative?
My goal with this is to provide choice to employers and ambitious people, and the projects would be things the corporations want to achieve, don’t mind sharing the results of with everyone (think more along the lines of a practical dissertation) and would normally be able to ahieve themselves (and possibly already have a rubric for grading results as these projects must be a normal part of the functioning of such businesses) but do not wish to invest more resources and miss out on discovering new talent simply for a more immediate, guaranteed return on investment.
Also, why not make projects interdisciplinary? The sort of rigorous documentation used for scientific studies could be adapted to the method by which students would be able to make notes and regular progress reports. Additionally, encouraging artists or multimedia focused individuals to make visual or audio documentation of their progress engages more fields in the process and encourages interdisciplinary networking.
I think this idea may be contingent on the development of a much more far-reaching change in the education or possibly corporate models in order to function in the real world, but there are many potential benefits I can see to this.