> More expensive than you'd think

Even a setup with cheap Raspberry Pi's? And Vim. (built-in bonus points for students being able to save and exit). Was just reading about LEAP[0][1] that thought you may find interesting if you have not yet seen it.

Separately, wanted to say I enjoyed your essay and appreciate how you think about improvement with a focus on the practical usefulness for the student.

TL;DR: I especially think the concept of Interview-Based Grading would be the way to go.

A couple progressive Whiteboard interviews for CS a semester, power point for Business etc. If they use AI to prepare, create material or learn/improve from then they are gaining the skills that will be required in real-world work. If they choose to not learn the material (or understand/check AI output) it would show during the back and forth with a panel of professors (dunno if you guys like working together though); built-in load sharing with a wider range of questions.

I guess with issues you mentioned the whole system needs overhauled for it to work. Adjusted for different courses -- and I dunno how practical this is but -- but why not let kids do more guided self-learning, keep office/lab hours for individual help. Fewer lectures due to self study with repurposed time for live evaluations. Eliminating non essential courses a student takes for a major/minor would also lessen the collective workload of professors (fewer student, but ones that want to be there).

That learning & evaluation set-up would be my dream college -- I would have pursued Sociocultural anthropology and archaeology in that setup. I wanted to learn and engage, not prove I can regurgitate rote-memory notes that are handed out while my employment required me to grasp changing context and modify the code while not unwittingly automating the deletion of production dbs.

[0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/leap-low-bandwidth-educatio...

[1] https://github.com/T4EQ/leap