Comments by Michael Edmiston and Doug Craigen are considering a
very interesting point.
In Mexico we have a hard pression coming from our ministery for education
(SEP in spanish). In a similar way they want a national exam for each
carrer
as a system to substitute the final dissertation of our bachelor degree
(licenciatura in spanish). This has been done in administrative disciplines
and
in civil engineering, where an important enterprise do something similar to
a
final exam (exit test).
This is an interesting problem for physicists and their carrers at the
level of
bachelor degree in physics. Just one example: after 35 years of history,
our school has 125 succesfull students in the sense that they finished
his bachellor degree program. 101 of them did a final dissertation and
near 70 have studied master in science or Ph.D. in a wide spectrum of
disciplines: since computation to general relativity and cosmology.
So that one can say that our students are people very easy to
train in several things useful for our society. How can we meassure that in
an
exam?
It is one example, but I feel that students from other countries (in
Chemestry, Physics and Mathematics) have similar skills. Useful in several
disciplines.
Certainly a government doing a pression is a big problem for any
institution
but one can not be sure that this is the right way to follow.