My "limited" and "rigid" 60s and 70s mind considers the "test" to be more than a piece of paper or even my current video. The test is my life. I'm very happy with my grade.

If your "test" is your video, or your basket, I won't call you "limited." :D

leaning off topic of the Off Topic topic....

what if a few generations from now, there is no need to LEARN anything, or fill your brain with anything? Maybe utilize all that empty brain space for personal creativity or deep thinking of new things.
They could look back at our long school years of studies and learning for tests as a crude, back woods method of knowing things, the way we might look at 14th century doctor's techniques.

WE may not think their way is the BEST for humans, but who is to really say since they will have a thousand times more access and abilities than we can even fathom in science fiction books.

just pondering :)

wwjd, I think the philosophy you're considering is already well established and growing in popularity. Maybe good can come out of it but I'm glad I will be gone before it takes hold. We have already experienced something similar in prehistoric times.

After ensuring your survival for the day, you had time to contemplate things like creating the wheel. And then all that came after, was built on the knowledge of what came before.

The ability to rapidly search for information is a plus - I'm not arguing that. But I work with two individuals who are recent college grads, and I consider them to be highly intelligent and much more versed in current tech than I am. But...many times I'll give them a task of researching a complex idea - which means search engines. A lot of times they'll come up dry, whereas I will quickly come up with results. Because I know what I'm searching for and how to modify my parameters to get the results.

Thanks for sharing!
I used to repair these in the late 80's to pay my way thru college. Ripping them apart testing the 8pin ICs, for memory issues, swapping motherboards, ripping apart floppie drives... For some reason the flybacks on the monitors were always going bad or had de-soldered themselves from the board creating cold solder connections.. oh the great memories! ((:

Oh btw, the kid who thought it was cool had the makings of a great engineer! ((:

A lot of times they'll come up dry, whereas I will quickly come up with results.

This is because you have more experience. We build on prior knowledge. I know for a certainty that I know more at 52 than I did at 42. Lots of it is trivia but it forms a scaffold where I can hang a lot of new ideas.

The great thing about the internet is that it's so much easier to build on *other* people's prior knowledge. It accelerates the spread of ideas, both good and bad.

The funny thing for me is that I used to imagine a global network of knowledge that everyone could access and we'd solve lots of problems with it. I was 8 years old and it was 1970, but it just seemed kind of obvious at the time. Children have great ideas, maybe because they're unencumbered by knowledge.

"This is because you have more experience. We build on prior knowledge."

I totally agree. My concern is that they don't have the "prior knowledge" that I had at their age due to education. They do have different knowledge and the ability to manipulate technology that I didn't have at their age. Perhaps their different knowledge will serve them well. I hope I can have a conversation with them a decade from now about philosophy, art, science and they can hold up their end without a smartphone. ;-)

What if they don't NEED the prior knowledge? I know this sounds impossible for us - just as impossible as the INTERNET or men in space seemed in 1950....

NEO: Can you fly that thing?
TRINITY: Not yet. Tank, I need a pilot program for a military M-109 helicopter.

Trinity's eyes flutter as information surges into her brain, all the essentials of flying a helicopter absorbed at light-speed.

TRINITY: Let's go.

Thank God Trinity had the prior knowledge that an M-109 helicopter even existed.

Maybe someone will enjoy future conversations like this:
(tap tap) Did you see this?
(tap tap) What about this?
What does it mean?
(tap tap) I'm not sure. There are so many opinions.

"Apple execs visited Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and took the idea for their next gen computer. That's why I always get a laugh when I think about Apple's lawsuit against Microsoft for "stealing" ideas from the LISA / MAC for use in Windows, when Apple stole the idea from Xerox."

Apple did not "steal" the mouse from Xerox.

From the "New Yorker", "Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation", by Malcolm Gladwell
"So was what Jobs took from Xerox the idea of the mouse? Not quite, because Xerox never owned the idea of the mouse. The parc researchers got it from the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute, fifteen minutes away on the other side of the university campus. Engelbart dreamed up the idea of moving the cursor around the screen with a stand-alone mechanical “animal” back in the mid- nineteen-sixties. His mouse was a bulky, rectangular affair, with what looked like steel roller-skate wheels. If you lined up Engelbart’s mouse, Xerox’s mouse, and Apple’s mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept."

My first job in Silicon Valley was at a company on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto in 1976, I passed the PARC building every day.

Perhaps this discussion is differentiating between data and understanding. Data is a list of "facts" (such as can be googled or looked up in an encyclopedia) while understanding is knowing the context and interactions between those and other facts. A very simple example is looking up DoF tables without knowing how they are derived or that the given figures are affected by viewing conditions.
Teaching to pass a test is useful (since they have to be passed) but the useful outcome is often limited to the context of that test. Reminds me of a final year thermodynamics examination in which the examiner, knowing that we'd worked hard through the text book examples, gave us completely different problems; that tested our understanding of the field.
Your test might be to employ Vegas in competently cutting a video, but without wider understanding and experience the result will be dull indeed.

Douglas Engelbart was working at SRI International when he came up with the idea of the mouse, the mouse had subsequently been incorporated into the graphical user interface used on the Xerox Alto. During an interview, Engelbart said "SRI patented the mouse, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to Apple for something like $40,000." Apple was so inspired by the mouse they scrapped their current plans and redesigned everything around the mouse and GUI.