The mastery system is flawed
Overall, I think the mastery system is a good method. However, I think it can be revised to make it a little more realistic and effective.
Fisrtly, I think the requirement to get 100% to move on is an unbelievably high bar. I understand that its about pracitice making perfect. However, students do not have an unlimited amount of time to keep repeating the material until they get a perfect score.
I think there needs to be some sort of threshold to show that the student 'sufficently' understands the material and can move on. I know this is counterintuitive to the mastery system, but I think that the absolutes of it are unfair and unrealistic.
In Sal's Ted talk, he mentions that we want to have confidence that engineers, doctors and builders are masters of their discipline. But in reality, they are not all graduating with perfect scores from university to demonstrate this.
Alot of it comes from the experience you get from working in the field. There are measures in place (i.e. guidance and checks from mentors and peers) that help prevent errors. If students were continually practicing until they reached perfection, it would take too long to graduate or it would be impossible to do so.
Also, probably the most important and easy thing to fix, is to show that a course has been completed and not just mastered. I know that Khan Academy want to keep things simple but this is inaccurate and unfair.
Tying course completition to mastery is discouraging. It makes the student feel that their work is incomplete. There could be one metric to show the status of the course content, i.e. videos watched and tests taken, and another to show the level of mastery.
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