Passing a Class at School Does Not Imply Having Learned All The Material

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It’s shocking how many people think that passing a class at school implies having learned all the material in proper depth.

Are students made to clear a bar for mastery on every single one of the hundreds of granular topics covered in the course?

No – a student can typically pass a course despite not having mastered a ton of material.

Even a student who gets an A might have only mastered 90% of the material in the course.

Less, actually, if some of that grade comes from participation.

And don’t even get me started on grade inflation.

And to top it all off… the course might not even be comprehensive!

It might not cover all the topics that ought to be included in a proper treatment of the subject.

Even in the topics it does cover, the learning tasks might be cherry-picked / watered down to be artificially easy or otherwise not truly representative of what needs to be learned.

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