Agree wholeheartedly. That's exactly the approach I take, but the problem of course is that 1) it's difficult to do successfully, and 2) students "freak out" because the exams become unpredictable and they end up getting more stressed out that they need to about succeeding at the exam. Of course, my regular high-performing students do well regardless, but I haven't found a way to convince them that they have the skills already to do well on the exam. Instead, they pull all-nighters and ultimately damage their results on exam day when, if I had given it as a surprise exam, they would have been just fine. So on some level, it's a need to teach self-confidence, self-diagnostics, and introspection. This (again) is a TON of work, since it's necessarily person-dependent, so only professors who have the time and energy can actually attempt to do it. The others will just say "screw it" and give an exam of sentences copy/pasted from the textbook, but with keywords, blanked out. Yet another extreme are the professors who endlessly allow exam re-submissions, so students just brute-force hack their way to a passing grade.
I want the obvious response to the above to be "okay, just raise the bar for teaching professors" but, unfortunately, those decisions are usually made by people who are completely ignorant to the process, and who rely on broken systems of teaching evaluation. Those who would be good at making those decisions are busy doing the teaching, and doing it well. Also, I don't personally think we want a system that so micro-manages our professors' pedagogical styles. I get fairly positive student feedback, but so do the professors who offer endless exam re-submissions and whose students have basically zero material retention after they pass the class. The optimal (but impossible, partially due to sheer laziness) way would be for students to self-select themselves into classes with professors that they believe will ultimately teach them more and better material, without having the extra pressure of the effect on their GPA.
The problem in my eyes is while you are fighting the fight your department is fighting another one entirely within a university of departments competing in yet another fight.
Who is fighting at the organizational level for the students?
The problem is systemic. All of the solutions I see, here and elsewhere, describe a small piece of the problem. At best — a few courses in a curriculum.
> Who is fighting at the organizational level for the students?
Plenty of people. Sometimes at cross purposes, rarely with little effect.
Unlike Tolstoy's happy families, good teachers are not all alike. For the most part, I can't envision what a productive organizational-level fight would even look like.
I want the obvious response to the above to be "okay, just raise the bar for teaching professors" but, unfortunately, those decisions are usually made by people who are completely ignorant to the process, and who rely on broken systems of teaching evaluation. Those who would be good at making those decisions are busy doing the teaching, and doing it well. Also, I don't personally think we want a system that so micro-manages our professors' pedagogical styles. I get fairly positive student feedback, but so do the professors who offer endless exam re-submissions and whose students have basically zero material retention after they pass the class. The optimal (but impossible, partially due to sheer laziness) way would be for students to self-select themselves into classes with professors that they believe will ultimately teach them more and better material, without having the extra pressure of the effect on their GPA.
(edited with some last-minute thoughts).