I’m tired of these college intuitions complain about cheating during COVID because people have scholarships, and tons of money lost on the line if they flunk a class.
Also because of COVID there are not much tutors available to help if you. Unless you spend more money for a third party tutor.
This is basically what lectures are like with good professors at a good university. Active discussions, group work, etc., even for classes like calc that can be taught much more easily as infodump lectures.
But in general, I agree that the overall format of the college experience, with two semesters a year of 10-15 credit hours per semester, and every class graded and weighted equally (getting a C in some bullshit course required for your degree because you lost the luck of the draw and got some hardass prof with a chip on their shoulder will be considered exactly the same as the work you do to get an A in a difficult fourth year important course) is something that has just become entrenched. Like most institutions, it is removed from any historical context or genealogy of development and instead treated as though its structure is self evident. The capitalist contribution is to industrialize it, requiring things like a ton of different accreditation and qualification checklists for universities to be "real" universities. While it is important to have some method of evaluating institutions to prevent frauds, the checklists we have have the side effect of maintaining the status quo and not preventing obvious scams (SANS Technology Institute is regionally accredited and largely exists as a way to scam military dudes / taxpayers out of GI Bill dollars when they retire).
I think MIT had a pretty good approach a while back (don't know if they still do it), in which students could opt to do many courses as pass/fail. They could choose ones to be graded that they wanted to sink a lot of time into (thing that they expected to be interesting, useful to them, etc.). There's much more room for mistakes and bad exams for a pass/fail course.