Collegiate Choose Your Own Adventure

As someone involved in education for about 13 years, I found this pretty interesting:

https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/47730/

There are some professors out there that are allowing students to pick workloads for courses that will result in a set grade.

Want an "A?" Pick the A level amount of work to be done.

Want to skate by on a "C?" That's fine too.

On the one hand, I can easily see parallels to the "real world" work environment. Many jobs are tailored to a set of specifications. If you are bidding on a commercial construction job, you will be bidding with a scope of work defined. Coding a new app? It will have functions and metrics that need to be achieved. This would match the kind of choose your own adventure style of grading in the so-called "contract grading" scheme.

On the other hand, an "A" grade is supposed to represent mastery of the course material while a "C" is supposed to represent an average grasp of it. Essentially if you are only getting a "C" then you shouldn't be progressing to the next level in that course of study. But then there are immediately problems with how that mastery is demonstrated and who does the judging. There are plenty of professors out there who are just phoning it in and not really evaluating each student's grasp of the material.

So I can see the appeal of the contract system. Do these 32 assignments, get a 70% or better on these tests and you're done. No arguing, no wondering what-if. It's a little injection of the free market into the system mired in tyranny.