Academic progress is traditionally measured in terms of skill mastery, aiming to ensure students have the right tools in their toolsets to prepare them for the next stage of their academic or professional lives. However, because of the flaws in existing assessment philosophies and the ever-changing nature of the world, students don’t always leave as well-equipped as they should be. To ensure that students leave the classroom prepared to handle whatever comes next, we propose a new curriculum/assessment model that emphasizes skill-acquisition efficiency (SAE), the ability to adapt learned skills for unfamiliar situations. This experiment examines the effectiveness of our initial method for measuring SAE and any patterns that may emerge regarding how students learn. This method assigns weights to assessment exercises based on their novelty compared to a given curriculum. Our results show that there may be a correlation between a student’s ability to absorb learning material efficiently and their ability to adapt that knowledge for novel situations.
