You’re conflating the course and the classroom. The explicitly stated goal of most courses is mastery of a well-defined set of domain-specific knowledge and sk

You’re conflating the course and the classroom. The explicitly stated goal of most courses is mastery of a well-defined set of domain-specific knowledge and skills. The only way to objectively determine if the course achieved that goal for a given student is comprehensive assessment. Bad assessment design, much like bad experiment design in science, is worse than useless—it actively misleads and confuses. A well-designed, repeatable, reliable assessment is a prerequisite before one can even consider the effects of particular pedagogical methods inside or outside of the classroom itself.