The Classroom Must Change

Despite strong market signals that they will continue to fail financially and/or fall short of achieving their missions, few U.S. universities have tried grading reform as a means of attracting more or better students. Structural barriers rooted in misaligned incentives stymie institution-wide reforms, while maverick professors often run afoul of students who prefer the relative ease of multiple choice and other memorization-based tests. The existence of top-down and bottom-up impediments at existing universities suggests that new higher-ed entrants, such as the University of Austin (Texas) and Reliance College (Chicago), will form the bulk of the vanguard of much-needed academic reform.

University presidents now stay on the job an average of just 5.7 years. Deans last on average only about five years and Provosts but three. The general strategy appears to be to quickly make superficial changes to secure a higher post at a higher-paying school, or to transition into a lucrative consulting gig or cushy faculty appointment in a professional school before retirement. Like Wall Street execs trying to juke quarterly numbers, university leaders prefer shallow reforms with catchy titles likely to appeal to relatively uninformed stakeholders.

University leaders prefer shallow reforms with catchy titles likely to appeal to relatively uninformed stakeholders. Strangely, university leaders do not appear to be hired or fired based on periodic anonymous surveys of the faculty they supervise. One would think that trustees, visitors, presidents, and other decisionmakers would be very interested to know what faculty thought of their academic leaders before investing a million or more dollars in their new hires. Most professors possess more discernment than the median undergraduate, after all.

Faculty expect that the current leadership team will likely change before any evidence-based grading reforms can be tried in real classrooms, much less widely implemented. Faculty members certainly understand that the peripatetic nature of their administrative betters places pedagogical-reform attempts on risky ground. Although tenured faculty might understand that it is in the best interest of their institutions, and hence themselves, to innovate pedagogically, they expect that the current leadership team will likely change before any evidence-based reforms can be tried in real classrooms, much less widely implemented. Most therefore remain content to uphold the status quo, which, at many universities, remains lectures coupled with memory-retrieval-based tests.

Pedagogical variations abound, for sure, but few can be considered truly innovative. A former colleague once bragged that he was at the cutting edge of pedagogy because he allowed students to ask questions during his lecture! Another “flipped” her classroom by instructing students to read the textbook beforehand, then doing concept-reinforcement activities in class, only to discover that few students can or will read the textbook, thus rendering the in-class activities much less effective.

Indeed, many putative innovations fail to achieve better student outcomes on net. Some professors, for example, employ apps that allow students to ask questions in class anonymously. That might lead to more, or more honest, classroom interaction, but it also enables shy students to avoid developing their public-speaking skills.

Other putative pedagogical innovations proliferate because professors understand that they aid teachers more than students. Group projects became popular because professors learned that it was easier to grade 10 good group projects than 30 or 40 mostly so-so individual ones. They justified it by noting that most businesses create teams to complete projects, while failing to acknowledge that freeriding is much more easily detected and punished at work than in college.

Despite these and other barriers, including meddling unions and accreditors, maverick professors try to initiate change by implementing pedagogical innovations in their own courses in the hopes that successful ones will proliferate. This bottom-up approach, however, often falters on the rocks of student expectations. Many fervently believe that the “best” professors lecture and test memorization. Most students like class sessions based on GEMS (games, exercises, models, and simulations), labs, videos, and such, but only if the professor also “gives notes,” by which they mean “provides them with easily memorized talking points or facts to regurgitate on quizzes and examinations.”

Tellingly, even if confronted with the futility of memorization (computers do it better, and students soon forget the bulk of what they have “learned”), students justify their need for “notes” on the grounds that their other professors test only memorization. The bottom-up approach therefore fails due to a collective-action problem: “Good” teaching tests and aids memorization, so assessments that move up Bloom’s taxonomy to creation, or even mere application, are, in the view of many students, “bad.”

Students justify their need for notes on the grounds that their “other” professors test only memorization. I (re)discovered this unfortunate truth in a U.S. economic-history course in fall 2024. I’ve published scores of books, chapters, and articles in the field, so I could have easily created fascinating lectures on almost every topic, ranging from banks to nonprofits to slavery, from the colonial period to the present. In other words, I could have given “notes” galore. But why do that, I reasoned, when I could edit a textbook composed of chapters written by the students themselves? I’d mentored other undergraduates and even a few high schoolers to publish in their own names, after all. I indeed received a contract for the book (look for America’s Macroeconomy: A Quarter Millennial History out of Cambridge Scholars in early 2026), but three out of the dozen students in the class complained bitterly in their evaluations about the lack of “notes” and exams!

Despite fiscal pressures, incumbent institutions remain stuck in the outmoded memorization paradigm. I’ve also had students in my principles courses beg for multiple-choice exams, like “all the other professors” give. You can look up definitions, formulas, and such on those synthetic brains we all carry around these days, I explain. What your phone cannot do is perceive the economic concepts embedded in most of the documents that bombard us daily. That is what students need to be able to do to land and keep a good job, invest wisely, or vote according to their economic self-interest, so I test them with prompts rather than questions.

Most introductory courses are amenable to testing by prompt, which can be anything—a natural-language document, lab results, a figure, a photograph—that will have some meaning to students who have internalized the relevant course concept enough to be able to spot it in the prompt and take appropriate action. For example, instead of asking students to, say, define misplaced modifiers (short answer) or to pick one out of a list (multiple choice), the professor provides an example of one, not previously discussed in class, as an exam prompt, with full credit to students who spot the problem and edit accordingly. Students who can apply course concepts without explicit instruction will be much more employable, all else equal, than students stuck in the old memorization paradigm.

So why does testing still rely heavily on memorization? Just as group projects make life easier for professors, so too do multiple-choice exams. Most textbooks come preloaded with scads of them and will grade them automatically. Students internalize little and forget most of it, even before they graduate, but most will dutifully provide “good” evaluations for courses based on memorization if the professor makes it easy, with notes that signal what to memorize. Instead of the old communist canard “We pretend to work and the government pretends to pay us,” in U.S. higher education students pretend to learn, and professors pretend to produce workers, while administrators pretend to lead.

Despite fiscal pressures, incumbent institutions remain stuck in the outmoded memorization paradigm, trapped by both top-down incentives for quick, cosmetic change and barriers to bottom-up reforms attempted by maverick professors. New college entrants therefore remain the best hope for testing and other types of pedagogical innovation.

Robert E. Wright is a historian of economic policies ranging from banking to higher education to slavery, with 25 books and 80 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters to his credit. His critique of the New Deal from the perspective of public choice theory came out in 2024.