Of course grad school could be fixed. Even undergrad could be fixed. Here’s how.

• Divide semesters into two-week intervals (or something about that long). During an interval, you only work on one or two things, and you work on them all day, every day.
• Instead of classes that consist of lectures, work on projects. A little lecturing can work wonders, so lecture occasionally. And then allow time for the wonders. Those happen when the student does something real. The instructor’s main job is to provide some structure by helping define do-able projects that really teach you something, and to help you get unstuck when you get stuck.
• A good daily schedule for a semester: working session in the morning, lunch, working session in the afternoon, 90 minutes in the late afternoon for lectures and presentations. These can be given by professors, researchers, guests, and grad students.
• Instead of meaningless homework problems (math puzzles that have no apparent use, essays that are not interesting to any reader, etc.), the projects should do something real. For example, in a course on software engineering, you should engineer real software. In a course on persuasive writing, you should write with the aim of persuading a target audience of something. In some topics, like history, writing papers might be the only feasible option, but in that case, writing papers is the real thing. Ph.D. students should spend most of their time doing real, publishable research alongside their professors, working as apprentices.
• Close the feedback loop. When the student works on something, let the student see and judge the results. For example, let the journalism student compare his or her story with that of other students in the same class, and get comments from the people interviewed. Let the education student see how well his or her own child students pass a test of what they were taught.
• Separate learning from certification, and dispense with grades. In courses that people take because they want to learn, nobody bothers with grades. (Almost all courses taught outside schools are run this way.) Students cram for exams because their schedules are crammed and because grades are used as carrot/stick every single day. Let actual learning be the carrot. A major project, a certification exam, a thesis and defense—these can provide a basis for prerequisites and granting a degree. If a student does badly in a course, let the only penalty be retaking the course.
• Instead of threatening students with low grades, have a time limit. Students can do as they please for three years, and then they’re done, period. They can go for certification any times they like during that time.

Teaching and learning are well-understood—outside of schools. People are naturally good at teaching and learning. Just see how people really learn, and provide an environment that supports learning instead of opposing it.

“Example is not another way to teach. It is the only way to teach.” —Albert Einstein.

Objections

The academic world exists to cultivate knowledge of a sort that doesn’t lend itself well to measurement and feedback loops. For example, philosophy and literature.

The activity that counts as “doing the real thing” can vary greatly from subject to subject. The main function of philosophy, literature, and history is to build wisdom: the kind of very rich, contextual knowledge that enables you to tell good from bad, important from trivial, and, especially, to notice important things that the uneducated might pass over. An interval of any of these topics can consist of reading a book, writing papers, and then talking about what you might approach differently now. A particularly interesting way that I have seen a course run had the students declare their opinions about the answer to a certain, given question at the beginning of the course, read various readings, and keep a journal of how their answer to that question changed each week.

Don’t you need to take a lot of classes to learn the field before you’re ready to do real projects or research?

No. Lecture-and-exam classes don’t work. We’ve been doing them for hundreds of years now, so there is no more doubt about that.

You pick up all that needed stuff by doing real work. When you find a gap in your knowledge, you fix it. The instructor might give you an exercise to help you fix it. Let this happen naturally, in the course of doing real work. When it arises naturally, the student sees why it’s important. School becomes learning, not engaging in meaningless exercises that theoretically “prepare” you for something—something that occurs so long after the preparation that the preparation is wasted.

With some subjects, there is simply a vast amount of material to memorize, which requires many sleep cycles. It can’t be done in two-week blasts. For example, mathematicians must learn hundreds of theorems, botanists must learn hundreds of plants, etc. This favors long semesters. And long semesters require multiple classes, or you won’t cover a broad enough set of topics.

This is indeed a potential problem. The 90-minute period at the end of each day provides opportunity for memorization-oriented activities. The daily work sessions provide ample opportunity to put that memorization into practice right away, or uncover areas where memorization is needed.

Tournament-level Scrabble players memorize even more than grad students. They often work regular jobs, and regular jobs usually focus on just one thing all day. If Scrabble players can do it with this kind of schedule, surely college students can. But, indeed, the details of how will need to come from experience. I don’t have a really solid answer right now.

Not everyone likes to work on only one or two things at a time. Some people like lectures and taking lots of simultaneous classes.

People like that do exist, but they’re a tiny minority. Virtually every college in the world caters to them and wastes time for the rest of us. Let’s try school in a way that works for most people, somewhere.

There is also the distinct possibility that the lecture-and-exam crowd isn’t really learning anything beyond how to succeed at the lecture-and-exam game, but that is an open question.

This has never been tried. How do you know it would work?

I suppose I don’t. Well, it’s been tried in almost every line of work that doesn’t call itself a school, and it works very well there. It’s standard operating procedure in almost every human culture. The basic formula: do the real thing, but let beginners do it alongside people with more experience so they can get help when they need it.

A sensible way to try this in a college would be with some sort of pilot program with a small set of students and participating professors. Do it on a small scale, see how it goes, repeat, move up to larger scales when you’ve built up some confidence. Of course this is the sensible approach to any new idea. You already know that, and you don’t argue about it. It’s also the way I’m proposing that students learn in school. Think about how insane it would be to run real projects the way classes are ordinarily run: lots of lectures and out-of-context homework and exams—OK, now we’re ready to go live.

Wouldn’t people slack off without grades?

Do people slack off when they pay hundreds of dollars for a real course outside a university?

Do people slack off with grades?

A certain amount of slacking off will always happen. There’s no way around that. But which way reduces it the most? Which way of opposing slacking causes the fewest side-effects? Having a time limit, or counting every homework mistake against the final grade? The better part of learning is making mistakes, and most grading penalizes mistakes. That is, it penalizes the normal learning process. Think about that.

If you have to use a carrot or a stick, then the student’s motive is not learning. Carrots and sticks confuse students about the purpose of school. They don’t learn algebra or biology or history, they learn how to game the system: to get away with doing as little as possible to get someone to make some marks on a page that say, “You passed.” Surely school has a higher purpose than that.

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