Fellow blogger Nominatissima requested that I write about the finals. I think that many people will find this topic relevant at this moment. Final exams are also something of a sore point with me, as people will see presently.
I hate finals. In my country, everything is always 100% about the final exams. You can never show your face in class, then ace the final exam, and get a top grade. I studied within this system for 4 years and it made me realize that the system is absolutely not conducive to any actual learning.
For the first 3 semesters I taught at my current school, I never offered finals. Then, my secret was discovered, and I caught hell. We passed a resolution at a departmental meeting that I have to give final exams in all of my courses. It was even mentioned that literature courses needed to have final exams, which I find to be very strange. Then, I got an official letter to the effect of finals being crucial and warning me that I was obligated to give them. I’m also forced to give the finals during the finals week, so scheduling them differently to ease the burden of the students who end up having 5 or 6 finals in one week is also out of the question.
So if you are a student and you think your prof is being mean by scheduling a final exam, you need to know that s/he probably doesn’t even have a choice in the matter.
I still try to make the finals as painless as possible. Usually, students come to the week of the finals completely exhausted. They simply don’t have the energy to bring their best to the final exam. I believe that it would be completely unfair to structure the grade in a way that would prevent a student who worked hard during the semester from getting an A just because the final exam was not spectacular. In all of my courses, you can fail the final but still get an A if you worked extremely hard during the entire semester.
Since I’m convinced that memorization of huge quantities of information is not a useful skill nowadays, my finals are not cumulative. I don’t want students to have any intense cramming sessions before my finals. Ideally, I don’t want them to prepare for the final at all. As I always tell them, “You can’t compete with Google.” This is why I don’t really care if my students don’t remember the year when Spain lost its last colonies. It is a lot more important that they manage to discuss why the Spanish-American war was crucial both to Spain and the United States.
It seems strange to me to grade people on how good their memory is. Some people simply have a bad memory but it says nothing about their intellectual and professional future. As a result, I construct my final exams in a way that requires no memorization and no guess work. Usually, I provide an excerpt from a text or a photo of a work of art (a building, a painting, a sculpture) and ask them to engage with it critically.
I have a feeling that many of the students would prefer to cram and then reproduce the “correct” responses during the finals. Analyzing is a lot more difficult than memorizing. But if I’m forced to offer final exams, I will at least try to make sure that they have some actual educational value to them.
In the second part of this post, I will offer advice to people who are preparing for their finals right now.
Clarissa's Blog 
I don’t know about that. I hated cumulative exams. In classes within my fields of study (English and political science), exams like yours were a blessing. Classes were usually discussion based, or centered around reading multiple texts and analyzing them. One of my favorite professors gave the worst sort of exams- multiple passages from the works we studied, and we were to identify them, THEN analyze the passage. Can you imagine analyzing a passage when you’re not quite sure where it even came from? You had to have some grade-A bullshitting skills.
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I always provide the name of the author and the title of the work for the students in the text of the exam. What’s the value of them guessing who wrote what?
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To be sure we were familiar with the texts, I suppose. He always took the excerpts from the other exams we had through the semester, so we had some idea. But I pretty much ended up trying to study by identifying the quotes, and pre-preparing some essays for the questions he might ask about them. It was a whole lot of work and stress for nothing. I much prefer writing a paper-that’s better prep for my fields anyway.
You weren’t allowed to reschedule your final at all? Do you get to choose when you give it in the first place?
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No, the time, the place and the duration get assigned by some invisible authority. 🙂 And we never know when the final is going to be until the very end of the semester. The suspense keeps mounting.
I have no idea what the point of such a system is. Some courses in my discipline simply don’t lend themselves to an exam. So we have to come up with some useless exercises just to fulfill the requirement for the final.
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The most vital function of education is to enhance thinking, not memorization, skills. The most simple computer can record facts in its memory but thinking about them is rather different.
Essay examinations are more difficult and time consuming to grade (particularly if students’ handwriting is as awful as mine) than multiple choice or true-false examinations and the ideology of the teacher can come into play even though it shouldn’t. As I recall, the exams I took in college and law school were of the essay type and I actually enjoyed them. Grades were also based on essays submitted during the term and, to a lesser extent, on the merits rather than the frequency of class participation.
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My non-language courses finals are always open book. And the students come with the questions the week before. Example of a question (in Spanish): “According to what we have read of Sarmiento (Facundo) and Marti (“Nuestra America), what would each author say about the presidency of Evo Morales in Bolivia?”. Explain and justify your answer using examples of at least three texts related to the topic. They can have whatever they want with them.
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What a cool question! Can I steal it for my course?
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Of course!
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I often don’t do in-class finals for my graduate courses. However, I do term papers or take-home finals for these courses, and these are due on the scheduled date for the finals, that’s a school requirement. You may want to implement something like this and make peace between the need to have a final on the final’s date and actually give the type of assignment you may prefer.
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As a test-taker, the worst tests were the ones where you asked yourself “What exactly is this question testing?” and realized that in reality, the question was not at all testing what the professor probably thought it was. Like, rather than testing understanding of a concept, the exam is testing whether you know 3 different *names* for the concept.
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That’s a shame that your university requires you to give an exam during finals week! At both of the universities I attended, most of the professors would either give the final during the week before finals week or just assign a final paper or project in lieu of a final exam. Their intentions were good, of course, but the ironic result was that the week BEFORE finals became hellish, because it was essentially finals week with a full regular course-load on top of it. Finals week itself was pretty much a joke. There would be semesters when I had no finals at all.
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“This is why I don’t really care if my students don’t remember the year when Spain lost its last colonies. It is a lot more important that they manage to discuss why the Spanish-American war was crucial both to Spain and the United States.”
Yes and no. Yes: the most important thing is to discuss why the Spanish-American war was crucial both to Spain and the United States. No: I sitll believe that dates are important and that they should be memorized to some extent. I may be old school, but without knowing dates you cannot make sense of history.
I remember that I loved final exams and final papers when I was an undergrad. Professors were giving me the opportunity to provided an analytical synthesis of what we had covered throughout the semester. For this reason, I also believe that cumulative exams are good. I sincerely wonder what is the point of ‘parcelling out’ the content of a course.
I tried something new last semester. I gave a series of quizzes in the first half of the semester, in which I gave analytical questions based on the material that we had just covered. In the second half of the semester, I gave a more cumulative exam in which I asked questions with ‘visual organizers’ like you do or questions like Spanish Prof’s Martí-Sarmiento-Morales great one. The vast majority of my students preferred the quizzes format, but my smarter students stood out in the cumulative exam.
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A partial final is way different than a 100% final. I have no big problem with partial finals.
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“I’m also forced to give the finals during the finals week, so scheduling them differently to ease the burden of the students who end up having 5 or 6 finals in one week is also out of the question.”
That’s ridiculous!
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