Final Exams – to be or not to be?
In order to try and stir up some e-dialogue, I offered up this conversation starter to our staff in the Monday Memo: Are final exams necessary? Why? & Are recommends (being excused from writing a final exam due to attaining a high enough mark in the coursework) necessary? Why?
I invite any and all input from the blogosphere!
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:17 am
I think that the exercise of Preparing for a final exam can be a very worthwhile educational exercise. I also think the only way to make the final week of review and reflection (which extends retention of the learned material by refreshing it one last time in the context of the rest of the learning) have any impact on the student is to have the final exam concept. I don’t agree that it has to have major weighting in the grand marking scheme, and I don’t even agree that it is a good indicator of what the student is taking away from the class, but to complete the review exercise I think final exams have merit.
I fully support the idea of reccomends, but I feel that we are reccomending the wrong end of the spectrum. The students that traditionally get reccomended are going to progress in most cases to some situation where they will write final exams at a post secondary institution, or in some job training capacity. The students who are below whatever arbitrary mark we set usually drop even further down the well when we throw a final exam at them, and in many cases, will never write a final exam again once we send them off into the real world. These are the students who should be allowed to finish the class in some other way in place of a final exam.
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:43 am
I’ll chime in. Firstly, I’m anticipating that many that argue for the final exam do so because they feel it prepares them for post-secondary education. I’d suggest we need to stop pandering to this because first of many post-secondary course are moving away from this as well. Not all but some. Secondly, if we’re interested in a true and accurate summative evaluation of student achievement, we need to consider the best tool. It may be perhaps that a final exam is part of it, however I find it hard to believe that a final exam can truly provide an accurate picture of learning that has taken place over a 5 month or 10 month period. Part of the issue continues to be the portion of these exams that measure knowledge only. If they are measuring higher level thinking skills, how many of us can completely demonstrate higher level thinking skills in a 2 hour exam time?
Maybe we need to redefine the term “final exam”. If it simply means a demonstration of learning, it would take on more forms. Projects, performances, written work, the list could go on. It certainly wouldn’t be nicely crammed into 2 or 3 hour time slots. I’ll be we already have a number of teachers who are beginning to rethink this and have started the shift. I’ll be interested in their ideas.
April 2nd, 2007 at 1:55 pm
I think that final exams are critical in forming good work habits for students. First, we need to prepare students to learn how to deal with day to day pressures. I believe that stress is not a bad thing, without it nothing gets done. However, if you don’t practice dealing with stress then your ability to rise to the challenge is diminished. In regards to recommends it’s two fold; I don’t think strong students should be exempt from writing. However, it is nice to show students that continued work does have its advantages….(Natural Consequence).
April 2nd, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Trev, I don’t think that final exams are necessary. I believe that we have much better way of telling if a student has obtained the knowledge or not. As for the stress factor, I can put stress on kids at any time and see how they respond, I don’t need a year end exam to do this. As for the rewarding of those that work, I’ll beg to differ. As someone who wasn’t in the high range in math, I worked harder than almost everyone in my class to get my marks. You aren’t rewarding hard work, you’re rewarding natural ability. Watching my own children, this has become obvious. We need to be very careful when we begin to say we’re rewarding hard work with recommends because some of your top marks will not be from hard work at all. As has been pointed out, a pen and paper test only measures a specific type of knowledge. We need to break free from this standard and exam what students know not how well they answer my test. We are seeing that being able to score well on a test is not really an indicator of how well one will do in life after school. Take some time, go through Daniel Pink’s book “A Whole New Mind” and begin to look at the possiblilities. We really have to get away from these boxed in responses and ways of looking at the world.
April 2nd, 2007 at 10:21 pm
I usually find myself sitting on the fence somewhere in these conversations. However, this time I’m leaning a bit. Here are a few thoughts.
Thought 1: Are universities moving away from the model? I’m a bit skeptical. In an era of downloadable papers the controlled final exam environment provides some sense of safety. It is an opportunity for the learner and the teacher to trust the outcome to the abilities and ethic of the learner. However, like all forms of assessment and evaluation, not all methods apply to all situations. I wouldn’t want a 3 hour pencil and paper comprehensive exam on wood working. However, a well written calculus final can create a true summation of the knowledge and challenge my higher level thinking. My experience with my own exams and seeing others exams has been that final exams represent a chance to “sum-up” the key ideas from the class and ensure that students have attained these critical objectives. This, of course, is a key goal of our classes.
Thought 2: Most parents first question about their child’s progress is “what’s their mark?”. Our society craves comparison and standards. So, if we really want to do away with final examinations let’s start to battle the dependency on ‘marks’ and move to other measures of learning. How we upload that to the SK Learning is another matter
I’m not suggesting it’s not a battle worth having, but, we must realize that this is also a social issue.
Thought 3: We spend the equivalent of 8 (used to be 10) class hours on final exams. In fact, this may be one of the bigger drawbacks with exams as time is such a precious resource.
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:16 am
That is the question…
A few points:
There are six strands in the ELA program. Final exams address only two of these in detail – reading and writing.
Grade 12 departmentals should be applied across the board, or not at all. In one case a teacher knows exactly what he/she is teaching towards, in the other, he/she has only a vague idea. (I know prototypes can be downloaded.)
A final exam, especially one that is heavily weighted, may cause negative emotional reactions, anorexia, other alimentary upsets, and insomnia.
On the issue of recommends – many students will make that extra effort in term time to obtain one – some even chose their schools because of them!
Some people spend a good deal of class time unfocused, and a final test gives them a last chance to make an effort and raise their mark.
Because students differ in the amount of home help they receive, or resources they can call upon, PERHAPS a final exam will demonstrate their independent abilities more clearly.
Despite my ambivalence, in my own teaching practice, I prefer 3 or 4 end of unit quizzes, worth 5-10% and a 10-15% max. summative end of class test, written in the classroom where feasible.
Project based learning does not lend itself well to heavily weighted finals.
…whether it is nobler to suffer the marking agony or take voice against it …
April 5th, 2007 at 6:12 am
What exactly are the real situations in real life that require you to answer specific questions in writing without any technology or your social network available? I can only think of “professional certifications” which are meatn to measure some rudimentary level of memorization.
How about skills and understanding? Since the exams aren’t teaching but evaluation tools, they should measure the understanding and the skills that the learner has gained. Again I question whether the skill of “cramming for tomorrow’s exam” or “writing a cheat sheet” or “memorization” are so valuable in professional life that they should be the #1 skills we teach students.
As social media in general has shown, “we are smarter than any of us”. As automation advances, more and more jobs can be automated. The jobs for humans require more and more complex thinking. And actually we’re already in the situation where a single individual really cannot be competent by himself. What is needed are both the artificial cognitive aids (computers et al) and communication with other humans (the social network) to get any meaningful work done.
So if in real life the skills that matter are social skills, self-management skills, skills for learning independently, and skills for metacognition, why is the #1 skill we teach “how to memorize stuff to be able to answer a question while being isolated from all technology, resources, and social contacts”?
Again, I understand that cheating is a major concern. I have a proposition for you to think about: What if all exams measured the skills listed above? Then those who had the best social networks would most likely excel in the tests. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? I do not have an answer for that, yet.
April 5th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
I’ve heard it’s “old school” thinking that supports the use of final exams – so I guess that makes me old school, too. Preparing for a comprehensive exam is a valuable exercise; students should revisit material from the course, review processes, and hopefully, make connections between concepts that they may not even realize are there while they’re knee-deep in a unit. Furthermore, students are presented with a stressful situation, and with guidance, learn that they have tools to manage that stress. The final exam itself is free from outside influences – there can be no downloading of answers to hand in. There are no other group members to do the work for you. Is it a perfect measure? No. Should it be the only measure? Of course not. Is it a useful measure? Yes! As for the suggestion that final exams do not mirror real life situations, consider your last doctor appointment. How secure would you feel if you listed your symptoms to your doctor and then watched her Google them for a diagnosis? Or what if your plumber showed up to install your new water heater, but had to look up the instructions? Every day people in a variety of jobs and professions are required to draw from their comprehensive knowledge to solve problems. Universities and colleges still use final exams, and according to an article I read recently in Maclean’s magazine, in the next 10 years, 70% of jobs/careers will require some kind of post-secondary education. If we do away with final exams, we are doing our students a disservice.
As for recommends, no, they’re not necessary. They are, however, an incentive to those students whose marks are in the 60-80% range to keep their grades up.