A gem: The better part of learning is making mistakes, and most grading penalizes mistakes. This is true; it makes students unadventurous. Fortunately, most s

A gem: The better part of learning is making mistakes, and most grading penalizes mistakes. This is true; it makes students unadventurous. Fortunately, most science PhD programs already work nearly the way he's proposing: - Students are attached to a lab early on, and mentored by a professor for the rest of the program - Classes related to the degree usually allow enough flexibility in the assignments that a student can find a way to apply their lab's line of research to the current topic - Students take 2-3 lecture-style courses and a scattering of seminars each semester for the first two years or so, then focus entirely on research (mentored, of course) for the rest of the program - Grades are implicitly just a formality. Maybe not everyone figures this out, but you're doing things properly in science course, you will get an A. Don't even worry about it; just focus on your research and let the prof know you're learning something. In a PhD program, your report card is really your list of publications -- and that's another can of worms. The biggest departures from this I see are in law, business and med schools, where there's a secondary goal of filtering students up front. (And they charge so much for the honor. Science grad school isn't so much a hefty up-front investment as a temporary oath of poverty.) My program is a mix of CS, math/stats and biology, and it's interesting to see how the disciplines collide in the curriculum committee. CS and math/stats teachers do have a lot of material that simply must be lectured to students, with lots of targeted exercises along the way -- these professors push for more core courses. Science teachers constantly try to trim the core requirements so students can spend more time in the lab, doing real research, without distractions. I don't think this dynamic would have evolved if the department was simply following the rote lecture-and-exam tradition.