@fixingrocks , I understand that the deviation can be subjectively viewed as getting away from treating the adult student like a real (gasp!) *adult/i, but some professors like to give the incentive to students to help themselves. Meaning, by giving a quiz on a reading before a lecture on that reading’s content, it forces the student to read before the lecture or suffer a direct consequence to their grade (the poor quiz score). Of course, there are also the indirect consequences that educators think about just as you’ve mentioned with exams or papers. The idea is just how your logic flows above, except that the educator is forcing the student (by incentives) to be more active in the course in general: read, give a quiz on the reading, then lecture. A typical student is more likely to do the readings when there is an immediate direct consequence to not doing so in the form of a poor quiz score. In fact, some professors have been known to require short written summaries turned in of that week’s assigned readings as a qualifier to even take a quiz - no written summary that week, then you automatically get a 0 on that week;s quiz no matter how many answers you would’ve “guessed” correctly. Of course, keeping on your logic, if a student does well on the quizzes, then they are more likely to follow and absorb the subsequent lecture (and participate in the lecture!), which is more likely to also result in better grades on exams.
Basically, some professors like to incentivize students to actually choose to do the readings. Ideally, the quiz is supposed to be more objective in the sense that as long as the student actually did read the material (with effective reading technique for that particular student) that he or she should reasonably do well on the quizzes. The lectures, subsequently then, fill in gaps or allow the professor to point out items of particular interest, and may allow more in-class lecture time to answer more questions from the students rather than revisiting or re-lecturing some more nuanced details that the students should have picked up had they read the material beforehand, as assigned. Even better when a professor truly uses a text/assigned readings as supplements to the lectures only and really gives meat and substance to the material than what the texts may present initially.
And, TBH, while I’ve never taken a graduate-level course, I’ve talked to plenty of close friends who have and that is exactly the set up at graduate-level. The professors absolutely expect that you’ve done the reading for the upcoming lecture, and the graduate student is expected to actively talk about that material to the professor and the rest of the class (akin to a verbal quiz). If it’s obvious that the student didn’t do the reading for that lecture, then he or she would be penalized somehow. Some professors have been teaching college-level courses for a very long time, and they’re not new to college students skipping the readings.
Some of my more organized and memorable classes were of this very structure. Read that upcoming lecture’s assigned reading, type a summary of the reading, turn in the summary to be able to even take the quiz, knock out eh objective quiz, then kick-back for lecture by taking notes where there is particular emphasis and asking questions that I knew were not already answered in the readings or the lectures thus far to that point.