Every now and then, I enthusiastically browse through the course menus offered by new online course startups like Coursera and Udacity. It is the same enthusiasm I used to experience when schedule for next semester's courses would be out in the grad school. There were so many interesting courses, but I was forced to pick only few of them - 3 or 4 at most. Beyond that you won't be able to handle the workload - assignments, midterms, finals, labs and what not. Besides extra courses wouldn't be covered by the assistantship or doing bad in one of them would affect the GPA. Interest in a particular subject wasn't the topmost criteria for choosing course. After so many years after the grad school, none of those concerns matter but only the basic interest still persists.
Thanks to the new online courses some of those artificial constraints are removed. I don't have to worry about affecting any GPA or paying extra. But sadly, the new medium of education delivery is still carrying some shackles from the old traditions in education.
One of them is evaluation based on tests. I always hated tests all my life. Even after I aced some of them, I never got any satisfaction. That is because, they were artificial challenges. Tests and Grades are the hallmark of traditional education system, not the core desire of learning.