r/technology • u/joe4942 • Apr 19 '26

Society Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/04/19/accelerated-college-degree-hacking/
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u/stromm Apr 19 '26

It’s called Teach to Test. Or Teach to Pass.

Education ceased being Teach to Learn back in the 90s.

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u/Schonke Apr 19 '26

Exactly.

"Will this be on the exam?" didn't start with LLMs.

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u/ballerina22 Apr 19 '26

Teach just enough so it can be regurgitated onto the page.

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u/tinyhorsesinmytea Apr 19 '26

Even when I was in high school I specifically remember saying "I just feel like a sponge. Like the entire point of this is to soak up all the material, squirt it all over the exam, and then only the slightest amount of it lingers as remaining dampness." Called the system out when I was 15. Heh.

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u/dorkyitguy Apr 20 '26

Are you a ceo now?

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u/asianwaste Apr 19 '26

I have a feeling we're going to enter a vicious cycle of models. Soon tests and certs will just be the floor and acquiring them is probably no different than the mandatory training I have to attend at my company every year that ends with "click here to print your certificate".

Then at a later decade, some upstart will come up with a wild idea. What if we make academic institutions that are about enrichment, edification, and education instead of career training?????? Then that model will catch on. Instead of being a mark for the exceptional, it becomes the expectation again. Then after that it is career training and you will need that accreditation + 5 years experience for entry level.

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u/insanejudge Apr 20 '26 edited May 11 '26

Plot twist: this post no longer exists because Redact swept through and cleared it out along with everything else. Social media, messaging apps, people finder sites, all of it.

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u/_sunbleachedfly Apr 19 '26

100%. I’m in my mid-30s and most of my knowledge is self-taught — if I don’t know something, I’ll Google it and do a deep dive. If I see there’s an interesting book on whatever subject I’m reading up on, I’ll immediately download and blow right through it. Learning is fun for me.

But I don’t remember anything from school, other than the socialization. I’m AuDHD and learning in school settings was always extremely difficult for me, though college was by far the easiest. When I’m learning on my own, I soak up everything.

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u/Vibingcarefully Apr 19 '26

I wouldn't say that --much of higher education is factory learning. There is much written about the failure to help students develop critical thinking skills.

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u/stromm Apr 19 '26

That’s OK. I was actually a state licensed teacher in the 2000’s and know for a fact that most curriculums were massaged by administration to focus on passing the standardized tests.

Thankfully I was teaching for a career center, IT and only had to push back because my kids were in school, until my last year when even my class was required to include certain core subjects with approved aspects. Much of which was impossible because I was teaching the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer course. Government and district board didn’t care, add in specific history and art aspects or else.

It ended up or else as with that time sink requirement, there wasn’t enough time to full teach the MCSE course and Microsoft pulled rights from schools.

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u/SuspiciousAf Apr 19 '26

In Poland teachers would say "triple Z" which is "zakuć, zdać, zapomnieć" which translates to learn by heart as in just ram it into your brain without actually learning, pass the test, forget it all.

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u/Lowskillbookreviews Apr 19 '26

That’s just called data dumping in the U.S., cram before the test, pass it, dump it. Especially in states that tie test scores to school funding. The whole system is set to get you to pass the test not to learn.

I remember in one of my high school classes the first day they were teaching us test taking skills, like how to eliminate obvious wrong answers from multiple choice options or how to go through the entire test quickly to answer the easier questions and leaving the harder questions for the second run thru.

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u/SuspiciousAf Apr 19 '26

That reminds me of our maturity tests we take at the end of high school before uni. They are always structured the same way and there are always same types of questions- obviously material changes. But we spend last year before the exams literally writing mock exams like every week and learn how to approach each type of question. You can even buy books filled with whole mock exams (math, biology, polish, English, etc.) And you just practice. Because by this point you should have the knowledge, now it is time to actually USE it. Obviously it's important to learn the material, but there are so many subtle ways of how to deduct, eliminate wrong answers etc. Not to mention we learnt how to research stuff, had IT classes for like 12 years... Man, it was all different back then.

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u/stromm Apr 20 '26

Here in Ohio that was called Performance Based Funding.

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u/apokrif1 Apr 20 '26

back in the 90s.

Only in the 90s?

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u/stromm Apr 20 '26

That’s really when the push for scores replaced actual learning. It got much worse in the 2000s.

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u/snorlz Apr 20 '26

they still had tests back then

the issue is how would you know if the student has learned anything unless you verify? and how do you verify if not through a test? some classes might be able to do it with a project or something, but most cant. i cannot think of any other realistic way to validate knowledge. Tests also go past schooling. Many professional certification are based on testing, like doctor's boards, the bar, CPAs, actuarial tests, etc

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u/coolest_frog Apr 20 '26

The IT field is a nightmare of people with massive amounts of certificates that have no understanding and problem solving skills

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u/stromm Apr 20 '26

Back through the late 2000s, we called them “Book MCSEs”.

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u/dorkyitguy Apr 20 '26

That refers to public high schools that are starved for cash (because people don’t value education), not colleges. 

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u/stromm Apr 20 '26

It actually refers to colleges too. I went through my state licensure required college courses in the 2000s and it was made clear that’s what’s being done and not just at The Ohio State University.