Exams are scaling gone wrong

Do exams really measure your skill? Do they bear any resemblance to the real world? Why are they so designed? The next three paragraphs will give you more perspective.

Life is not a series of multiple choice questions. They just happen to be on your exams because they're easy to grade, not because they're representative of your knowledge.

"Scaling" is a business problem. If one good professor can teach 50 students in a year, that's not good enough. We need to "scale" this to thousands of professors and tens of thousands of students. And it's often done at the cost of quality.

Similarly, exams are merely an "educational scaling strategy" gone wrong. You learn by engaging in an activity creatively and getting personally mentored on how you can do better. Instead, we learn boring generic stuff not because they're useful, but they "scale easily."