Finals season is upon us, that necessary evil aiming to measure a semester’s worth of learning.
Evaluating students’ cumulative knowledge is a difficult and stressful task for both the student and the professor. Test-taking doesn’t always indicate how much you’ve learned in the course; it might measure how well you can memorize or regurgitate information rather than think critically and analyze a problem. A final should exemplify the tenets of the course, the major deliverables you will take away and use outside the course: “in real life.” This isn’t to say that academics should be wholly career-focused, but more that students should know the reason why they’re learning this in the first place.
For three years of my engineering degree, I took tests as assigned, often running out of time and sometimes getting sick in the middle of them. This had rarely happened in high school, so I put it off as adjusting to the difficult material. Though it continued to happen throughout every semester, it felt like asking for accommodations was the easy way or that I didn’t deserve it if I could still get good grades in the “normal” amount of time. I put up with the physical effects of stress because I was still doing well in my classes; I assumed it was just a byproduct of the rigorous courses. I was spending so much of the exam time just trying to ground myself and not lose my breakfast rather than analyzing the problem in front of me. Finally, after a particularly brutal Thermal Engineering exam, I reached out to the Office of Disability Services. I was able to sort out accommodations for 1.5x time and a less distracting, less stimulating environment. This has vastly improved my test-taking experience, and I encourage anyone in a similar situation to talk to ODS now and set yourself up for next semester. The exam environment is not the point; solving problems fast is not nearly as important as having a well-thought-out approach, and you don’t get extra points for suffering.
It’s difficult to come up with any kind of “ideal” final. For all the reasons above, I think time should not be a factor. You will never be better at performing calculations quickly than a computer; that’s what they were built for. Especially with fears that AI is being used to shortcut or cheat, a final should be designed to test the ways that humans are more capable than computers. Reasoning, creativity, modeling a system, and making reasonable assumptions for analysis; that is what we are built for. It was quite far into the design spine until I understood design thinking in this way. At a surface level, you can get by remembering which equations to use and the steps to solve them to get the answer. A lot of students choose STEM because it’s logical; follow the method and you will get your solution. However, it’s not about finding one right answer or methodically following a process. It’s the idea that there are many ways to solve this problem, and by leveraging the equations that govern it, you can know more about how it works and use it to your advantage.
I haven’t yet made up my mind about what resources should be available before a final: ideally, a student should be able to ace it referencing only the course material and required texts. Being able to bring your own annotated notes into an exam seems to be a reasonable approach, as closed-book exams are not indicative of how most of these problems are actually solved. The format is similarly loose: an exam may only evaluate what you know one time on one day, it is not a representative sample. Projects seem to be able to gather more information about cumulative learning better, but it can be a much more significant time commitment in completion and grading.
I have yet to do my routine of calculating the minimum grade I need on a final. I’m less concerned about needing to pull it together at the last minute. In freshman year, my virtual finals were marked by exploring the liminal spaces on campus: after hours in first floor Gateway South, empty classrooms, and the hallways of Jonas. It seems impossible to eliminate all stress from finals, no matter the format of the project or exam. Stress never dissipated as my finals moved in person, just changed how I experienced it. Your grades are important, but not as much as your overall experience of the semester and the learning you’ll take from it. Surviving is something to be proud of on its own.
