The course I lecture on, Strategic Thinking, aims to avoid examining how much someone is able to parrot learn and instead tries to test their reasoning, analysis and insight. Some of the ways we do this include:

• releasing the case study for the exam 2 weeks before
• leaving the questions as open as possible (i.e. not being prescriptive)
• allowing students to bring their course readers and notes into the exam
• alleviating time pressure by making the exam four hours long
• not setting a memo but instead having a discussion around how we would approach marking each question
• anonymising the exam papers so there is less bias in marking (which has to do more with our process than how the student thinks)

At this point we’ve done about as much as we can within the university’s rules. However, there is still a long way to go. As we move into the fourth industrial revolution, knowing content/information is going to be less important than having the ability to think critically.

We all need to update our teaching practices to ensure we prepare our students for this future.

Image is from the strategic thinking exam in 2015