Even within universities there is a constant battle between providing students with good chances to learn, and providing them with fair assessment criteria.
The lab experiments in physics courses are a good example of this. Everyone knows the students learn the most, and have the most fun when you tell them what they need to measure, and leave it up to them how they are going to measure it. Then leave it to them to decide which follow-up questions they want to ask ask and how they want to pursue those. However, a minority of students sometimes complain , especially if they feel their assessments were not fair. The university hates student complaints, and likes having ammunition to shoot them down by showing that everything was equal for everyone: which usually means a lot of structure in the marking, which in turn imposes structure on what the students can do (reducing freedom).
Obviously I prefer to lean towards more freeform than my institution, but I wouldn’t go “the whole way”. The bits of paper students get at the end are actually important for their future lives (unfortunately they may be more important than the stuff they learn). Having the genius who does an experiment in a very novel and weird way get a failing grade because the assessor doesn’t understand what they have done is the cost you pay for going too free-form. The reward is that they did the experiment in a very novel and weird way, so probably had fun and learned a lot.
Even within universities there is a constant battle between providing students with good chances to learn, and providing them with fair assessment criteria.
The lab experiments in physics courses are a good example of this. Everyone knows the students learn the most, and have the most fun when you tell them what they need to measure, and leave it up to them how they are going to measure it. Then leave it to them to decide which follow-up questions they want to ask ask and how they want to pursue those. However, a minority of students sometimes complain , especially if they feel their assessments were not fair. The university hates student complaints, and likes having ammunition to shoot them down by showing that everything was equal for everyone: which usually means a lot of structure in the marking, which in turn imposes structure on what the students can do (reducing freedom).
Obviously I prefer to lean towards more freeform than my institution, but I wouldn’t go “the whole way”. The bits of paper students get at the end are actually important for their future lives (unfortunately they may be more important than the stuff they learn). Having the genius who does an experiment in a very novel and weird way get a failing grade because the assessor doesn’t understand what they have done is the cost you pay for going too free-form. The reward is that they did the experiment in a very novel and weird way, so probably had fun and learned a lot.