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MIT Master's Program To Use MOOCs As 'Admissions Test' (chronicle.com)
jyosim writes: In what could usher a new way of doing college admissions at elite colleges, MIT is experimenting with weighing MOOC performance as proof that students should be accepted to on-campus programs. The idea is to fix the "inexact science" of sorting through candidates from all over the world. And it gives students a better sense of what they're getting into: "When you buy a car, you take a test drive. Wouldn't it be a great value for prospective students to take a test course before they apply?" said one academic blogger.
Given the rampant cheating that goes on in MOOCs all they're going to get is students who are good cheating and hiding their lack of knowledge. Those people shouldn't be going to MIT. They're future politicians and MBA holders, not engineers.
Anything we can do that stops people from wasting money on college will help to solve the massive problem that exists in this country right now. There are millions of kids that go to college that really have no business being there. Colleges have learned and adapted to the free market system we now suffer under and have realized that the more they can sell college as an automatic ticket to "the good life", and the more parents they can make feel inadequate if they don't fork over the dough to send their precious children there, the more $$$ they will be rolling in. There should be strict admissions testing for college just like we had to have strict requirements to receive a mortgage after the 2009 subprime lending crisis that nearly destroyed the economy. What we have going right now is a massive scam where millions of young people are sold a bill of goods and spend the rest of their lives paying back loans that they cannot get rid of, working in jobs that are nothing like what they were told they would have when they were first courted by the universities that dot our landscape. Protip: The college campuses are not as nice as they are because they have lots of wealthy alums contributing back millions to the college. They're as nice as they are because of all the people like you who are mortgaging the rest of your life to make them wealthy.
Isn't that called your undergrad degree?
MOOC is not a commonly used term. The ones you mentioned are. Do you understand the difference?