The End of Final Exams?

When the Harvard University does something, you can be sure people will take notice. Ranked #1 overall in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities, Times Higher Education Ranking, US News & World Report Ranking, and others, what Harvard does carries a lot of sway.

And what they’ve decided to do recently is get rid of final exams:

Earlier this year, the university announced that it would no longer expect its courses to conclude with final examinations. In the past, professors were supposed to obtain approval if they did not intend to give a final exam; from now on, though, they will need to notify the university if they do wish to give one.

Conservative critics quickly pounced on the news, decrying Harvard’s new policy as a symbol of everything that ails American schooling. “Harvard is yielding to education’s most primitive temptation: lowering standards and waiving measurements for the sake of convenience,” wrote Chester Finn and Micky Muldoon, both Harvard graduates.

The author of the article, himself a college professor, argues the decision is a good one: “Final examinations reflect an antiquated and largely discredited theory of learning, which equates knowledge with factual recall. By discouraging exams, then, Harvard is hardly forsaking academic rigor. Instead, it’s clearing the way for a more engaging, challenging, and truly educative college experience.”

Personally I’m torn on the issue. On one hand, I can see the author’s point, that often final exams (in their current form) emphasize regurgitation of memorized facts rather than evaluating actual knowledge, and such facts are usually quickly forgotten after the exam is over. Exams also tend to put a lot of undue stress on students.

However, I can also see the value in having final exams. At a time where plagiarism is seemingly so pervasive, having a final exam can be a good final check (though not fool-proof) of evaluating whether a person deserves credit for a course. It seems as though if the final exams were re-written to test actual knowledge rather than memory, they would be quite effective. And in some disciplines (ex, math) final exams as they exist today seem like entirely appropriate measurement tools.

What do you think? Is this precedent set by Harvard something other schools should follow?

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Tags: Culture, darren hewer, Family, Final exams, Havard, Self, student, studying, World

One Response to “The End of Final Exams?”

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• Cat says:

  September 5, 2010 at 1:39 am

  I think final exams are more trouble than they’re worth, and I’m very pleased that the course I’ve got this year doesn’t offer them. Harvard’s right; it emphasizes the wrong kind of learning. It’s hard enough as it is to push students to do critical, analytical thinking, and when they think a huge part of their mark is going to depend on rote memorization, it disrupts the whole process. And there are some students who won’t bother to learn anything but what they think will be on the exam, and others who have test anxiety and stress out needlessly.

  Other ways of avoiding plagiarism include staged assignments, informal response papers, in-class assignments, creative work, and (sanely marked) group work. These also have the advantage of compelling students to engage in the kind of thinking that promotes deep learning rather than surface learning. And best of all, you don’t have to try to decipher anyone’s handwriting!