Again though why have midterms or finals?

Break down the learning objectives to measurable experiment replication then:

Show one, do one, teach one

If you can’t do one or teach one you dont move to the next step.

It’s literally just how apprenticeship works and there’s no reason you can’t do that for calculus or intro to economics and especially applicable to EE, ME, CE

Teaching in academic settings is absurdly inefficient and counterproductive in my experience

Apprenticeship is a good model. The tutorial system also seems to work at some universities.

Personally I have found well-organized, clearly presented university courses to be great ways to learn the material. The combination of readings, textbooks, lectures, tutorial sessions, writing, labs, problem sets, course projects, etc. has been effective for me. Good textbooks and online resources have also been very helpful. Obviously it only works if you actually do the work yourself.

I'm not opposed to that. It would work really well for most applied sciences and engineering curricula.

It's a similar approach the armed services use to train MOSes as well.

Making the class pass-fail would also be more conducive for learning as well.

But still, some sort of benchmark would be needed to at least give students the ability to gauge their proficiency.