Finals Week

As I am writing this, I am proctoring one of my Final Exams. I glance up and down the room every couple of minutes to make sure that students are concentrating on their exams, and to check for raised hands. I’ve had a couple of individuals so far with quick clarification questions on the wording of the exam. Nothing the student doesn’t already understand, but they feel better and less nervous. My next final exam is later today and I will be grading this exam while proctoring the other one. My personal goal is to have everything graded by Friday afternoon before I leave work, but if not, some of it will spill over to next week. Everyone in this class made it to this Final although I had one student arrive 10 minutes late and the other 18 minutes late. The exam is two hours long.

This week has been relatively relaxed so far for me. I had my Finals written and taken (by me to ensure clarity, suitability and length) and photocopied last week. I’m sure my students are stressed. In my class blog, there have been several posts with variations of “5 tips to not stress out”. This week I moved around my office hours to maximize student visits. I’m pleased that many students showed up with questions. While many of these are the conscientious students who have come by before, I also had a number who were visiting for the first time. Most of the time when students visit, they feel they get a lot out of the time and wish they started visiting sooner. (I wish the same thing too.) I probably spent 7-8 hours spread over the last three days answering questions in my office. Other time was spent on reading, research, attending committee meetings, and struggling with sys-admin issues on a new computational cluster.

Office hours are one of my favourite parts of being an educator! Students are surprised to learn this. It’s when I feel I can be most effective in clearing up a particular student’s question or misconception. It’s where I see the most “aha!” moments. I also get to know my students a little better since inevitably a small part of the conversation goes beyond the class material. My students get to see that I’m not a scary professor, and that I genuinely do want to help them learn. After all, that’s why I became a teacher.

Much ink has been spilt, or perhaps many bytes have been set, on the pros and cons of Final Exams. They’ve been around for a long time, gaining momentum with the massification of higher education. In China, grueling exams to enter the civil service provided opportunities to move up in society for hundreds of years. In recent years, with the rise of “project-based learning” and many other such fancy terminology to introduce new practices that may not be all that new, the Final Exam has come under derisive scrutiny. In the U.S., the “regime of testing” has come under fire, some of it for good reasons. In most other countries, make-or-break final exams have been a big part of the life of the student for years. However, in recent years, this approach has been questioned.

What is the purpose of a final exam, project or paper? Certainly we use it to assess what the student has learned over the course of a school term. Hopefully there is an aspect that helps the student to synthesize what first seemed like disparate pieces of information into a more integrated whole. Different disciplines utilize different final assessments. In the humanities, a final paper is common. In math and science, final exams are the norm. In the social sciences, there is much more variation. Even within departments, there are differences given the variation in subject material and how the instructor constructs a course.

I personally find (and so do many of my colleagues in chemistry) that at the introductory level, exams are a great way to help the student learn the material and “put things together”. Exams are not the only assessment tool we use, but they are significant. I was reminded of this in office hours. Preparing for an exam motivates or perhaps “forces” the student to make sense of the material and forge connections. In chemistry, if one doesn’t make the connections, then it simply looks like too much disparate content to be memorized. As teachers we impress upon our students how the materials build on each other. My classes are peppered with “remember when we discussed [topic X last week]…” My exams also bring together different parts of the material across the semester so I can assess the student’s ability to integrate what they have been learning. Since a significant portion of the chemistry curriculum is hierarchical (for good reason), part of how novices gain expertise is to really master foundational content and skills, thereby allowing them to more smoothly progress to the next level. Exams are a good learning tool (yes, they’re not just for assessment) in that the act of preparing for the exam constitutes an important step in the learning process. Are there different ways to do this? Yes. But there’s no doubt that exams can do this well, provided they are well-written and provided that student learning leading up to the exam is appropriately scaffolded.

I’m now 80 minutes into the 2-hour Final. Five students have turned in their exams. I won’t look at them until later. The rest seem to be moving along at a reasonable pace. (One reason I take my exams prior to giving it to the students is to make sure they’re not too long or too short. I look for the Goldilocks sweet spot.) I’m actually looking forward to grading them to see what my students have learned.