Does Your Course Really Need a Final Exam?
Scholars are weird people, especially in the humanities. We constantly seek out new, innovative methods of evaluating our students, but when push comes to shove we fall back on the familiar. We love our final exams.
At the ends of semesters, we go to social media to lament our tiredness and how hard it is to finish up grading that last batch of exams. Around this time of the academic year, I often feel like replying to my colleagues and friends on social media with a question, does your course really need one? I often type out the comment but rarely send it because I don’t want to hijack conversations. I also know it’s a losing battle. Changes in deep-seated behavior don’t come from a reply on Facebook.
But my question is sincere. One of the first things I did when I was fortunate enough to finally land a tenure-track job after eight years of applications was introduce a motion in my department to make final exams optional in our English literature courses. It took me a year and a half to convince my colleagues, and it required some intense departmental and private conversations. My colleagues revealed their traumas from their own undergraduate exam experiences, and seemed driven to repeat them through their students.
In the end, I was only partially successful; my colleagues agreed to make exams optional in our upper-level courses, but not in our first- and second-year courses. I took what I could get, and I haven’t included final exams in my upper-level courses since.
Humanities scholars are extraordinarily talented at overthinking things. We are brilliant at talking ourselves out of innovative methods of evaluation because we fundamentally have a faith in the history of knowledge and powerful beliefs that the books we read, study, and teach are such complicated oracular objects that they require extensive study. We believe that content can only be mastered through comprehensive final exams. Sometimes, I suspect, we also worry that the digital age is destroying the one method of evaluation that can ensure our students aren’t cheating: the handwritten, in-person final exam. That shipped has sailed. Goodbye, for so many reasons.
Many of my department colleagues still assign final exams, so I know that I’m an outlier. And I don’t really question their beliefs in the pedagogical value of traditional exams. However, I get frustrated at this time of year when I hear my colleagues complain about (1) grading exams and the disappointment they experience when their students don’t seem to have sufficiently mastered course content, (2) having to deal with (legitimate) requests for extensions and accommodations, and (3) the general fatigue of a final round of grading at the end of a hectic academic year. The Covid pandemic has amplified all of the complaints.
I still can’t help think that there are some ways of easing the exhaustion and disappointment. For starters, if it’s possible, why not just don’t assign final exams? If it isn’t possible, push for changes in your department or faculty if you have that power (so many of us don’t). Presumably, your students have worked their butts off in your courses to follow your expectations in formal writing assignments. They are already well on their way to becoming young scholars with effective critical and analytical skills in both reading and writing. They are also taking other courses, so mastery of content is something that emerges over the course of a degree, not just in your course.
Give your students a break from the strain of constant critical engagement. Emphasize a range of smaller, easier to grade, assignments earlier in the semester to fill up your spread of grades. Or embrace innovation wholeheartedly. Assign an unessay in the middle of the semester that requires enough dedication to justify the extra 20% worth of grades but keeps students motivated in exploring course content though their own interests and expertise.
Second, if you must assign final exams, do they have to be comprehensive in scope? When I’m required to include final exams in my first- and second-year courses, I refer to them as “course reflections” and lower their overall grade weight. I know that the end of a semester is exhausting for both faculty and students, so my final “exam” will typically be an open-book, take-home written response to a question like this: what is the most compelling or provocative thing you learned in this course, and why? Give your students approximately 750 words. Ask them to include a few quotations and references to the assigned course readings. Give them some expectations on how to write personally without abandoning critical and analytical insight.
The answers are always superior to yet another round of exam paragraph responses and essays comparing and contrasting two of my favorite poems that, coincidentally, have probably been assigned in virtually every English course since the beginning of English courses. Students are often clearer and more persuasive when they are unburdened of the demands of scholarly tone and analysis. I also never know what kind of responses I’m going to get, which adds an element of curiosity at the end of a semester. If I’m excited about my students’ responses, I might be a touch less exhausted and overwhelmed during that last batch of grading.
One of the best answers I have ever received was by a student who wrote powerfully about his realization that he was, in his words, a “horrible” writer. He was partially right; his assignments throughout the semester were riddled with fundamental mistakes, typos, and at times bizarre misreadings of literary texts. Paradoxically, his final course reflection was absolutely brilliant, beautifully written, and scathingly blunt in its self-reflection.
We want our students to achieve such moments of personal clarity while also learning how to engage critically and analytically with texts and contexts, right? Do traditional final exams achieve this aim? If you’re exhausted reading your students’ exams, certainly there are other ways of doing things that will be a benefit (and relief) to you and your students. Even if you believe final exams are the only means we have for truly evaluating our students, just try foregoing a final exam in a course, even if just one time. Be curious. See what happens. You might find even just a modicum of relief at the conclusion of your next semester of teaching. Because there will be another semester.
