"Universities these days do not seem to successfully evaluate deep understanding" If you (as Uni) try and do that, you'd immediately find your quota of those who have finished a degree to plummet.
At our university we had basically only TWO courses that required you to "understand" to pass them and not just mindlessly puke out formulas and insert values. These were theoretical electrodynamics and integrated analog circuits. These were exactly the exams that kicked people out of university, since you had only 3 attempts to pass them.
So, no, uni's will never try to force understanding, since so few are actually capable of that. Unis teach you to know the basic set of symbols, be a mindless symbol manipulating monkey and hope that industry would pick you up and enlighten you afterwards.
> If you (as Uni) try and do that, you'd immediately find your quota of those who have finished a degree to plummet.
Indeed: as a teacher, I have had the experience that there's pressure to pass underachieving students in the elementary courses (we don't want to scare everyone off by flunking them out of their first courses!) and then there's pressure to pass underachieving students in the advanced courses (it's not fair to pass them to this point, and then suddenly hold them to higher expectations!—or even, directly, "if we don't pass them then they won't be able to graduate").
At our university we had basically only TWO courses that required you to "understand" to pass them and not just mindlessly puke out formulas and insert values. These were theoretical electrodynamics and integrated analog circuits. These were exactly the exams that kicked people out of university, since you had only 3 attempts to pass them.
So, no, uni's will never try to force understanding, since so few are actually capable of that. Unis teach you to know the basic set of symbols, be a mindless symbol manipulating monkey and hope that industry would pick you up and enlighten you afterwards.