What is the point of final exams?
I mean, I give them. But do you want to know how many times I’ve had a student ace a final who was not already acing the course? That would be never. And do you want to know how many times I’ve had a student bomb a final who wasn’t already failing or damned close to it? Never. Every now and then a final exam can make a difference for that student on the cusp between a B and a B-, but is that worth it? Does anybody actually learn more from having a final exam at the end of things? And what does a final exam do for me? I mean, it’s too late for me to use whatever information I get from the final to teach that student differently or better.
And let’s not forget that at this point I am so done with grading.
So, seriously: what do you get out of the final exams that you administer? What, in the name of all that is holy, is the point, either for students or for you?
*Let’s note that the reason I do give finals, pretty much the only one I have left, is that the university requires them.
Reassigned Time 2.0 
I’m giving a take-home final. They have a week to figure out everything that they didn’t learn during the course in this comprehensive exam. Some of them really need that.
Really good final exams, especially in the humanities courses I took as a student, bring everything from the class together for a deeper and greater understanding. A provocative question that draws across several areas of the course can provide a major “Aha” moment.
Finally, there’s something to be said for studying for the final exam. I was allowed to skip my 202 final in my field because I’d gotten such high grades on the midterms and homework that it wouldn’t have affected my grade, but I just don’t remember that material as well as I did the courses where I wasn’t doing as well but did have to study for the final. (In fact, one of our textbook problems starts with the assumption that studying is the only reason to give a final exam… so why can’t we pretend to have a final and then just not give it, saving the professor the trouble of grading.) And I don’t have a nice cheat sheet from that class summing up all the important parts like I do for most other classes.
So, I think a well-written final exam can provide a great learning experience, and the stick of studying for it can help long-term memory, not just short.
I agree with the striking lack of difference that a final makes in someone’s grade (unless they totally tank it).
We are required to hold a “Final Assessment” during finals week. In paper classes that are small enough, I’m thinking of going to an all-presentation format. You turn in your paper on the last week of the regular semester, then while I grade, you spend your time working on presenting your material. This way, my finals “grading” could be done during the freakin’ final itself. Two birds! One stone! Bird soup!
I am a good exam taker and thus didn’t mind the exam in school. Now that I’m on the other end, I loathe them. I hate making them and hate grading them even more. This is only made worse by the fact that on a quarter system, you spend your ‘spring break’ essentially grading those stupid exams and prepping for the next term. Yuck.
Our university does not technically require a final exam but does require that if a final does not occur, the exam period be the final class meeting. With that in mind, I make the final class meeting more interactive with as little grading as possible. We either do presentations (I know, yawn, but it is super integrated into the entire course) or a debate.
Nicoleandmaggie – I think you’re right about the theory of finals…. but after grading a bunch of finals from general education classes where students clearly didn’t study, and where clearly they do not give a shit about getting better than a D, I’m becoming cynical about the idea of a final as a learning experience. More than anything, it feels like a waste of my time and theirs. I’m not a fan of take-home finals, as I think that it is just too much to put on them in addition to the essays that I assign in all my classes.
Notorious – I actually have moved to a presentation final in upper-level courses that are small enough to support it, in which I ask them to do a bunch of integrating of material from the whole semester and relating it to their final paper. It works really well, and I actually think that they do learn something from doing it.
You wouldn’t like law school. There, the point of the final exam is that it is the ONLY measure of student success in the course. A student’s ENTIRE grade is based on their performance on the final (measured against everyone else’s performance on the final, of course).
I personally think this is a piss-poor pedagogical model, mostly because I think it’s dumb to judge people entirely on their performance during three given hours of one given day, especially since the conditions under which one takes an exam hardly represent the conditions of being a practicing lawyer (when are you going to be given a problem and required to solve it in three hours without discussing it with anyone else??). I suppose some would argue that no, it judges someone’s ability to learn material. But I still don’t think those are good conditions for demonstrating what you actually know.
My other problem with this system is that it encourages people to prioritize the final over actually being prepared and going to class through the course of the semester. I mean, that’s a rational response if you have a prof who doesn’t add much to your understanding of the material, I guess, but I still think it tends to reward cramming and the ability to type really really fast, rather than any kind of consistency of effort.
All that said: I do think that taking law school exams does what nicoleandmaggie suggests, which is to bring everything together for a deeper understanding. I can still remember (and talk about my answers to) exam questions from 1L. And while I know exactly what you’re talking about, about final exams merely confirming the directions students are already headed (to an A or to failure!), because there often isn’t anything else to show where a student is headed, law school exams DO make a huge difference (and so people give a crap!).
(I also think undergrads often give up in exhaustion at the end of the semester, which is why final exams and final papers are often so disappointing, throw-away hoops to jump through rather than a real culmination of the material. While I do know law students whose standard for a final paper is, Do I have enough words??, generally everyone gets geared up for exams and the end of the semester is one of the highest-productivity times of the year. But I think that’s much harder to pull off for undergrads taking courses in all different subjects with assignments all over the place, rather than students in one professional program where you know from the beginning of the semester that the majority of your effort is going to come in the last weeks.)
Sorry, that’s kind of a huge tangent, but being immersed in finals (last! one! ever! Thursday!), I can’t help but add my share…
Call me crazy, but I mostly like final exams. Instead of the usual class discussions – which a third of the students fill with “aren’t I so smart and important” hot air, half say nothing, and the remainder occasionally present interesting questions – it’s usually a nice chance for me to digest what the hell we talked about, minus bullshit. Or, in the case of my statistics exam (in about 45 minutes…), to check that I actually remember the stuff I learned and need for work/future research.
But then again, I’d be just as happy if I were just given A’s (a la Zander: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrGAJ7hVh10 ) so I could focus on the learning part.
In the humanities, I don’t really understand the pedagogical value of a final exam which isn’t better served by a final paper. I had one humanities exam in undergrad which was mostly rote memorization, and the ones I’ve graded in grad school have also been mostly rote memorization. For essay final exams, I feel that they give the prof or grader all the hassle of bad handwriting, bad grammar, and lack of polish and organization with none of the depth that’s supposed to go into essays.
The rationale which has most convinced me of their value is that exams help weed out who is selectively reading or cheating for papers (plagiarism is a pretty big problem at my uni) but I think if I had my choice, I wouldn’t do them.
When I teach survey courses (in my case the dreaded Beowulf to Paradise Lost), I find final exams to be far more useful than a final paper in assessing whether my students have synthesized the material. Instead of writing 5-7 pages on say, one speech from Paradise Lost and avoiding everything that made them uncomfortable or that they skipped, they are forced to identify all of the key authors and texts and write in response to those (hopefully) aha moment questions to pull it all together. They are also required to know and employ all of the terminology and knowledge about literary time period divisions and historical events I have tried to stuff in there. I give them a very detailed study guide because, yes, it is all about the studying (and I let them bring in a 3X5 card with handwritten notes, too. Another “it’s really all about the studying” element). I spend very little time grading them, it’s pretty easy since they usually do correlate with existing grades. Writing them does suck.
For general ed (non-English major) courses and specialized seminars, though, yeah finals are not great.
I’ll also say here that I do think there is place in the humanities for knowing facts, terms and other things that do need to be known to the point of memorization in order to be effective. With that said, though, I have taken exams that rely entirely on rote memorization that were ineffective, and also taken (and tried to give) exams that ask for higher order thinking that requires some level of concrete knowledge to pull of the analytical task being asked for. I’m sick of English majors who don’t know that “seventeenth century” does not mean “Victorian literature” or whatever they make up.
That’s my former science person pet peeve about my own discipline speaking.
My final assessment is an exercise in which students have to get up and demonstrate that they’ve learned how to do what the class teaches them to do: interpret artifacts within the context of the society that created the artifact. It is just not done in writing. And I’ve found that they either pay attention and do a stupendous job, or blow it – just as they would have a written essay. And my way, I don’t have to spend hours wading through the awful essays to find a few golden ones. I’ll stick with my ‘final’ – exams are for the birds.
In the class I teach that is all first semester freshmen, many are really helped by the final exam, as they were slow to adjusting to college expectations. In most classes, however, it often seems like a way to tank an otherwise decent grade if the weight of them all together hindered your ability to study.
I also want to add that I do give and see pedagogical value in exams; I just only give them mid term. With the disclaimer that I teach in an interdisciplinary social science on a 10-week quarter system, this allows me to frame the first half of the class as basic concepts with accompanying midterm and the second half of the class as project/paper (often group based and usually due the last week, not the last day to give me time to grade) to apply the concepts with a presentation on the last day. To round out the grading, I also have a series of tiny reflections to make sure everyone keeps up on the reading, etc. I have very few complaints on the grades, in part because it allows most every type of learner at least one thing that they like.
The pedagogical purpose of final exams is to give the students a reason to attend class and pay attention after the midterm.
I’m with PhysioProf. The students who have done what is expected of them should be rewarded. Those who have not should be punished.
I will just add: I really enjoyed final exams in college, and I even loved writing my qualifying exams for my Ph.D. My experience was the ideal that Nicoleandmaggie discusses, and I think even for my non-A students that there is value in having to review, synthesize, and apply the knowledge & ideas they’ve learned in my classes.
There may well be educational value in final exams even when students earn Cs and Ds. (Even if the only thing they learn is that they need to come to class, do the assigned readings, and take better notes next semester.)
Actually, I do think that a large part of the final’s purpose is to remind students that they need to be paying attention all semester. I gave a cumulative final this time. 25% of the course grade. Honestly? with one class, I think that the sudden realization that I was serious, that I had been serious all semester, and they really *were* responsible for knowing the information was all that got most of them to class.
However, I’m trying to figure out what the hell to do with a bunch of finals that are at best mostly no better than low Cs (except the usual couple of superstars). What good does any written assessment — or presentation — do if the students not only don’t learn the information well enough to synthesize, but also can’t present it orally or in writing, even if given a take-home, in anything that resembles college-level organization, grammar, etc.?
I hear all of you with the good reasons for finals… which I think work for students who have even a minimal investment.
What prompted this post today was beginning to grade a set of finals from a general education course, which followed a format with which they were familiar from the midterm and I also gave them a sheet that told them exactly what the format for the final would be as well as gave advice about how to approach studying for the thing.
Let me give you an example. One of the things that I expect them to know at the end of the semester is what they read/watched, who wrote it, and what genre of literature (fiction, poetry, drama, film) each text is. (There were only like 15 texts on the syllabus – I’m not talking about knowing all that for a 100 different things or something.) So I choose five texts, and give the titles. They have to write the first and last name of the author and the genre. I give partial credit, so each one is worth three points. It never fails: there are students who get like a 4/15 on this section. What’s even sicker is that they could figure out the answers to some of these *just by reading the rest of the test*. Now, you might say, well, they’re just not good with memorization. It’s not like these students bring themselves back into the realm of passing with the “matching” section (where you don’t actually have to memorize anything, since you’ve got the definitions right there, and I give the same number of terms and definitions, so I’m not being tricky), or with the short answer questions (which they have a choice for, and yet they always seem not to answer the required 4 of 6 or whatever), or even the “close reading” section where I provide a passage that we covered in class and all they have to do is interpret it. The final means *nothing* to these students. And, I’m going to go out on a limb and say it teaches them nothing. Obviously these students are in the minority, but this happens *every single semester*. It is NOT an anomaly.
I actually think that finals in my courses that I teach in the major (from the survey to upper-level courses), in various formats, can serve some of the purposes that you all enumerate. But the above in my general education classes is just demoralizing, and it serves absolutely no purpose, other than to make me crazy. Well, or I guess to put them on academic probation.
I think there is a marked difference between giving a final in an upper-level course and a general ed course, for many of the reasons already mentioned. In a focused course of specialized knowledge, some type of culminating paper, project, presentation, exam or whatnot allows for students to demonstrate upper-level thinking skills – and they typically rise to the challenge. I usually have my students complete some type of final project that’s really a semester-long project of multiple bits; the “final” is either putting it all together into a coherent whole or providing a reflective paper on the process.
In a general course that students are usually taking taking to fulfill a college requirement, I wouldn’t dare try such a thing. My experience with gen ed courses is that the level of investment between students is too drastic for a multi-part semester-long project to work. It would be painful for them and excruciating for me. Likewise a final. I know they aren’t retaining enough of the course material to successfully engage their critical thinking skills at the end of the year on a 3-hour final. And I truly believe it’s because they aren’t invested in the material; they need the course for a requirement, not their major.
What I have tried, with a limited degree of success, is offering three different types of final to the class. If you want to sit for a traditional final, here’s the day. If you want to write a synthesizing/analytical paper, here are the requirements and the due date. If you want to do a presentation, here are the requirements and the day to present. In some ways, it’s more work for me, but at least it’s more enjoyable work.
The best thing I ever did in a gen ed course, though, was require the students to come up with a personal final to demonstrate their understanding of course material (with approval from me). Some of the students bombed: no higher-level thinking at all. Some did average work, as expected. Quite a few of them surprised me, though. I think they were more invested in the outcome since they came up with it in the first place. I had artwork, board games, papers on creative topics. The best, though, was a cheerleading routine, complete with back flips. And it truly did address course concepts!
All of this is to say, I commiserate, Dr. Crazy. I get very frustrated with finals, and I never give them in my upper-level classes. It’s taken me a long time to figure out options for my lower-level/gen ed courses, and grading is still pretty painful.
You just described a version of one of my sections. I gave them the questions for the final in advance, and even gave them access to the document where I was brainstorming key concepts — including some stuff in red that said things like “DON’T CONFUSE THESE!!”
Of course many did…
De-lurking to comment that I wish I’d found this thread earlier today, as it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
I went from an exam-heavy undergraduate system (even in upper-level English courses, there was always an exam that included at least two essays–one close reading and one synthesizing core course concepts), to grad student and teaching in a seminar paper-only system. And I completely agree with what nicoleandmaggie say–I can remember my undergraduate courses well because the exam forced me to synthesize them, whereas I can hardly remember the point of some graduate seminars I took even a fairly short time ago, because there was no reason to synthesize anything–just a frantic scramble to write yet another seminar paper, that may or may not have had a peripheral relationship to the readings of the course. It was a definite reminder of why, as an undergrad, I preferred exams to papers, and it’s also something I feel is missing from my students’ education now: exams force a breadth of learning, a contextualisation, which is very difficult to require in any other assessment in an undergraduate course.
So far, I may have just reiterated what others have said. But there’s one other major skill that a good exam teaches that it’s difficult to teach any other way, and that’s the ability to think on your feet. Much as nowadays we can call up information quickly and easily, it’s still likely that students are going to have to solve problems and answer questions quickly and coherently, based on the information they have at hand. The best way to teach this is the oral exam (not a pre-prepared presentation, but an exam), but considering how rare those are, the next best way is the written exam.
Where I teach now we are required to give a final exam and for most classes it is 100% of the grade. I gave a mid-term so it is only 70% for my class. At my previous place of employment I never gave exams, only papers. But, here the exam is the standard. Two things that argue in favor of exams here are the huge size of classes and the enforcement of academic honesty. My 400 level class has 85 students. So I really can not grade a 10 page research paper from each of them. I have also had no problems with cheating here. They give me people to make sure test takers do not cheat.
But, at my previous place of work I caught 20% of all my students plagiarizing papers off the internet. I failed every one I caught, but using google (turnitin.dot.com was not available) to find the plagiarism and then arguing with the student, chair, dean, and ultimately the vpaa for each and every case and we are talking about at least 20 a semester was a complete waste of time and effort. Since I assigned on average two short papers and one final paper for each class I had about 120 papers to grade a semester. If I did the same thing here I could have up to 1000 or more papers to grade a semester.
Having just a mid-term and a final makes grading a lot easier for the lecturer. A lot of people have it even easier here with just a final exam. I did my MA and Ph.D. in the UK so I am familiar with the system. I had thought about implementing it at my previous employment in order to streamline evaluation. It works quite well from the point of view of the instructor.
Just to be clear, I’m not actually “against” tests/exams, and I’m actually a huge fan of tests that take place throughout the term because students have a chance of going forward in the semester and improving and they give me a chance to adapt or to reinforce concepts that need reinforcing.
I suppose where I struggle is that I feel extremely limited in how creative I can/should be with the final in my general education classes (either 2 or 3 courses of the four that I teach per term, depending on the term). While it is true that my class sizes are small, with four different preps – four exams to write and administer, four different sets of students to wrangle – and then the fact that so many students who are just taking the course because it fits into their schedule and have absolutely no interest in learning the material – well, I suppose I feel like the finals in those courses aren’t worth my time.
For what it’s worth, I was a “good” taker of exams in college – a college that was, like my current institution, a regional state university without a huge reputation for much besides letting most people in (well, and a Famous Event in which Students Were Killed, the anniversary of which happens to be May 4). While I always did well on exams, I remember very few of them as really teaching me something, and I for the most part, excepting those few, felt like exams were a punishment to people who’d done well all semester, while they didn’t do crap for the people who sat in the back of the room stoned, or just didn’t bother coming to class, and didn’t turn in work. Because I was a “good” taker of exams, I managed to eke out a C in college algebra, not having attended regularly or done the homework. I’m pretty confident in saying that I remember *none* of the material in that class. I remember the class was scheduled at 8 AM and I never took another class in college that early after that. So maybe part of my problem here is that while I was a “good” exam-taker, and while I even enjoyed some exams, I also was more of a slacker than you all? And I phoned it in as a student as often as I really applied myself, come exam time? And I did that as a “good” student, so what in god’s name are the “bad” students doing?
I think that for the “bad” students, it isn’t the final exam that’s the problem. There’s just no point in them actually being in school at all. Not in class discussions, not for homeworks, not for midterms, not for papers, not for exams or labs or anything. It is just a waste of time and money for everybody. Unfortunately admissions doesn’t seem to be able to do a perfect job figuring out who those students are in advance.
Nicoleandmaggie – I think you’re right that it’s not the final that’s the problem *for the students*. It is, however, the problem *for me.* Here’s the thing: some of those bad students can be transformed throughout the course of a semester by writing a short paper, by taking a midterm test, by doing a group activity in class, or, hell, even just reading something that blows their mind. There is, actually, “hope” for some of the bad eggs. But if they haven’t gotten it by the final, they are just not going to get it. As Historiann said way up thread, in that scenario, the final punishes the ones who didn’t do the work. Maybe that’s good for them, maybe they deserve it, but I am not at all motivated by being The Great Enforcer who Punishes. And grading those finals? Sucks. It makes me feel like a failure as a teacher. It makes me feel like there’s no point in the work that I do. Now, of course, that’s balanced out by students who show progress, students who rock the exam. And I’ll be a lot more philosophical once I’ve finished with the grading for the semester – I’ll be able to see the big picture. But in the midst of grading a handful of stinkers, it’s hard to have that perspective.
In the language courses, the final exams make sense. In my upper level “content” courses, I give them because I am required to. But I have the freedom to give it as much weight as I want in terms of final grade (12.5% in my case). What I do is I make them brainstorm possible questions the class before (making clear that silly questions will not be included) and then I make a compilation of possible questions for the final exam. The final exam is open book, they are allowed to bring articles, class notes, whatever they want to the exam. The “possible question” list is usually 15 -20 questions. I take 5 of those questions, and that’s the final exam. I even tell them that they can bring all the questions answered to the final and just handle the appropriate ones to me that day. So far, in 4 years, only one student took me up on that, and she got a perfect 100 in the exam. It probably took 15 hours to finish all those questions, which I believe is more than what 99% of the students study all throughout the semester.
If they’re bad enough students, then their grade won’t change even if they get 100% on the final depending on how the percentages in the course work out.
Some spreadsheet work could determine what grades they need to get on the final to actually change their grades and then eyeball the exams to see if there is any hope that they’re outside those bounds. When I have a lot of graduating seniors (and not enough time to grade thoroughly because their grades are due early) I do that so I can focus on people whose final grades could actually change based on the final. My DH actually has quite a few students in that category this year… they will fail the class even with 100% on the final exam. So no reason to spend time on their exams.
Good luck grading. I’m not looking forward to next week.
The range of student intelligence and skills that are admitted to a particular institution is what it is. If you are giving almost all of the students in your course Cs or below, then your course and its graded exercise are inappropriately difficult for the capacities of the students you are teaching.
CPP, I’d agree with you if this happens across multiple sections over time. That said? Sometimes at an institution like mine you get a bum class. And it may not have anything to do with the assignment, which has worked before at that institution and will work again at that institution. If grades mean anything (and I’m not sure about that, but go with me here for a second), then sometimes it has to be possible that you might not get very many A or B grades in a particular section.
(For what it’s worth, my grades in lower-level classes generally end up being pretty close to a perfect curve. That said, I’ve had the weirdo section where students have done crazy-well, and I’ve had the weirdo section where all but two were at C or below. It really just depends.)
Oh, because this is the thing. It’s not that institutions like mine necessarily have all less capable or less prepared students. No, the thing that’s tricky about regional Unis is that my very good students are (I’d argue) as good as good students at elite universities. The thing is, there are fewer of those. I’d say the vast majority of the students I teach fall in the mid-B to low-C range, and then there are more students at the very bottom, who I think would fall into the stereotype of what teaching at an institution like mine is like. So the challenge in my teaching context is about finding a sweet spot that is moderately challenging for the upper third of students, challenging but do-able by the middle third, and maybe squeak-by-able by the lower third. Which means there is a lot of variation possible from section to section in how students perform, just based on who ends up enrolled. I think perhaps my feeling that tests don’t necessarily cut it may come from having to serve such a wide variety of ability levels in any given class. It’s easier to do that with other kinds of assignments than it is to do with tests, particularly final tests. At least for me.
So clearly engineering is completely different from humanities, but we often have comprehensive final exams worth 50-70% of the grade. In a few of my classes they offered a dual grading system whereby you could get a grade on the cumulative model (quizzes, midterm, homework and final, all graded on the curve) or the absolute model (your absolute % on the final determined your final grade in the class). I once get a B- in a class I was failing due to this absolute grade on the final because I got myself in gear in time by the end what I didn’t understand before. Have also gotten slightly better grades off this model (B vs C).
Back in my humanities days I really enjoyed the kinds of written exams J. Otto Pohl is talking about. Papers were fine, but I always felt like I had to put more effort and more research into turned in paper versus writing a series of short essays in a several hour blocked exam time was much less stressful and I felt (like other commenters have said) it didn’t allow me to get away with as much by only focusing on topics that I understood and avoiding things I didn’t.
I don’t believe in final exams unless they’re cumulative just as a rule.. however you bring up some good points .. on the other hand, asking yourself “what do you want to leave them with?” is a good way to create exam content for a final, right?
As a philosophy prof, I find that final exams (sit down) are very helpful in the intro classes that many students are taking for a requirement.
They are helpful in several ways:
1) Yes, they keep the slackers on their toes after midterm.
2) They make students think about the views we have studied in relation to one another in ways that I can only suggest during the course. (I say ‘make’ meaning that students will have to do this in order to do well on the exam; many don’t.)
3) They help me to discover, sadly, those students who have been faking it well in papers; I have in mind students who could make a good argument concerning texts they had in front of them but who never absorbed some important facts and concepts.
4) They help me recognize what I need to change or address differently in the future.
In upper level courses, I give final papers or essay take-home exams. I think the in-class final keeps the gen ed students a bit more honest through the end of the semester.