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Harvard Ditching Final Exams?
itwbennett writes "According to Harvard magazine, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted at its meeting on May 11 to require instructors to officially inform the Registrar 'at the first week of the term' of the intention to end a course with a formal, seated exam, 'the assumption shall be that the instructor will not be giving a three-hour final examination.' Dean of undergraduate education Jay M. Harris 'told the faculty that of 1,137 undergraduate-level courses this spring term, 259 scheduled finals — the lowest number since 2002, when 200 fewer courses were offered. For the more than 500 graduate-level courses offered, just 14 had finals, he reported.'"
i mean if you can trust the professor without testing the student, why not trust the student directly? why make the student get out of their car?
It's OK, it's not like they were real exams...they were only McDonald's applications. 100% if you filled it out completely.
Why not ditch finals? The hurdle at these schools is getting in not getting through. Once you are in they pad your grades, and pass everyone anyway.
If only they had 200 more undergraduate-level courses.
It's worth noting that it says "three-hour exams," and nothing else. There are other courses that could have other kinds of finals -- for example, engineering courses with comprehensive final projects or liberal arts courses with final papers/presentations and the like. In some ways, it makes more sense for students to work on a final project that utilizes the skills they're supposed to have learned in real-world situations -- especially for engineers.
http://www.tenjou.net/
a crazy sensation that then sweeps the nation! or not... :(
Can't say it's good or bad, but these kids will miss out on the cathartic drunken debauchery on the weekend following the finals.
Kids these days... buncha pussies.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
This is in general what happens. I was a math major there, and even a couple years ago very few math classes past the freshman level had sit-down final exams. Almost all of them, though, had take-home exams which were a much more thorough test of the students' abilities and took a lot longer than three hours (usually three days or so). I think this makes more sense and is a better measure of understanding. There are issues of cheating of course, but with a well-designed exam I think this problem can be minimized.
Right, this is only formal, seated exams. My undergrad classes mostly had formal exams, but none of my grad classes did. They were all take-home exams (except for the experimental class, which had an informal oral exam). Most of them were the cruel 24-hour take-home exam.
Harvard has a variety of final course requirements. A lot of courses require final papers which take a lot more than 3 hours to write. (That includes senior theses, which take a very long time to write.) A few require oral presentations, and some require projects. Still others require passing exams during the course itself. What's been going on for years (decades?) is that Harvard would schedule classrooms and staff to support test-taking only to find that professors had other ideas (and often at the "last minute," administratively speaking). Occasionally even the students didn't get the memo, and a few stranglers might show up only to find out there's no exam. All that said, I wish Harvard would provide professors and students with more guidance on assessments. The College should try to enforce some basic standards more effectively.
How do you compare two students, if they submit equally good papers, but the first student wrote the paper in 1 hour on the day before, while the second student needed 3 months of editing and lots of help from his friends?
Registrars are like air traffic control at universities. They keep track of where a class is being held (and make sure they don't double-book a room), who's teaching it, who's attending, what grades the students got...
When I was in school, as soon as the registrar released their schedule for final exam blocks, I e-mailed the professor to ask if this rumor the registrar was spreading was true. Many wanted to hold their finals earlier than the stated date, with the exception of the math department which wanted the last finals slot and always got it.
To me, this was critical information, I wanted to be able to tell my school break job when I'd be back in town so they could plan my work. The earlier I knew when the finals were and weren't, the better.
So, really this is a registrar reacting to a change that has already happened. Final projects have replaced the final exam in many classes, so if a professor wants to hold a memory-based final they need to alert the registrar, as that office's default assumption is changing to if they don't ask for a finals slot, they don't need it.
Whats old is new again, they really should bring back the oral exam. Not only does it make for a great name for porn movies, it actually is probably the easiest way to accurately asses the students understanding of the material and prevents cheating(for the most part). Best of all, it doesn't take 3 hours per student.
Monstar L
Yep, very few professions require fill-in-the-right-bubble skills outside of schools... so having them actually build or write out plans for how they would build something is a much better test.
Examples:
Easy, one is good at doing work and the other will be their manager. I'll let you figure out who is who.
Don't professors generally assume that you took all the time available to you and didn't procrastinate?
Tests just test how good your memory is. Not how to use that info in work place / real life.
Some certification tests are like that you can learn the test and have little to no idea on how to use that info in the work place.
Harvard and some other schools instituted the so called "Problem-Based Learning" in which instead of the traditional roles of educators spoon-feeding students information in class, the educators would give students a problem for them to do their own research on, then at the end of the week, they would meet in a small group and discuss the problem along with the educator. PBL then doesn't require sitting for final exams etc. The idea is that this method would stimulate independent thinking/research-focused minds. However this method is proving to be a failure in certain professional schools. I will not name names but a certain school in SoCal decided to switch to PBL in their dental program. Instead of getting students to do their own research, these students would just hang out, get a job somewhere, help out at their parents' business, etc. They depended on their fellow classmates to come up with the answers. The end result is that they aren't really prepared for the Board exams. They aren't prepared in substance (studying) AND in the fact that they haven't been exposed to intense sitting exams (the Board exams take 2-3 days). Students need to be forced to go to class every day, get information shoved down their throat, and be grilled and final-tested because sometimes their profession requires the grand-daddy of final exams.
Finals week is a fantastic way to destroy a complete semester's worth of hard work.
Have hands to tests as well and don't have fixed answers when more then 1 way can be the right answers and don't give a 0 for ones that get half of the answer right.
Not like anybody good ever learned anything at Harvard.
Have hands on to tests as well and don't have fixed answers when more then 1 way can be the right answers and don't give a 0 for ones that get half of the answer right.
Harvard graduates something like 96% of its incoming students. MIT graduates something like 94%. The students entering institutions like that already know more than the graduates of lesser schools.
Whatever Harvard does will be just fine ... for Harvard. My school, where I have 100 students in a class and I get about 5 minutes to evaluate each student, will keep final exams because that's all we have time to do. OK, so I exaggerate a bit but it really does come down to economics. How much time do you have to work with and evaluate each student? If you don't have much time, you have to use exams.
So that's maybe four out of around fifty subjects in the course of an engineering degree.
Has Harvard gone from the top to being one of the worst Universities or is US undergraduate education at the point where all we can expect from graduates is being able to cut and paste from wikipedia?
[citation needed]
Coincidentally, I read a piece today comparing the core curricula of Columbia vs. that of Harvard over the years. The gist of the piece was that while Harvard has had some interesting experimentation, they've also been prone to basing their course requirements on esoteric themes that no one outside of academia really sees the point in, and that Columbia, by contrast, has been much more committed to the classical means of teaching and curriculum. In short, the article posits that Columbia is more concerned with the acquisition of knowledge (and hopefully, some wisdom), while Harvard is much more into being a trendsetter and concentrating on the process of learning. Columbia: it's what you learn. Harvard: it's how you learn. Most people have this mental image of Harvard as being a place where you're enveloped in Plato, Milton, and Shakespeare, and apparently, unless you choose to be, that's not true anymore. There's really not a reading list that all students are required to master anymore. If you want to leave all that dusty stuff behind, hey, fine by the profs. Columbia requires all students to study the important books of the western cannon. So if you're looking for a classical Ivy League education, ironically Harvard may be the last place you should go.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Does the three-hour final give bonus points to the guy who finished in an hour instead of three hours?
Most of the classes I've seen at Berkeley have impossible to complete exams where the highest grade might be a 85% at the end of a final. The teachers purposely make it this hard and grade it on a curve and personally I think that there's too much variance but it seems to work since it's one of the better schools out there. In the end, if you fail your final and so do your peers so you can all get a good grade except for the one at the bottom.
As a student here (there), I'll tell you no, there are no bonus points for being efficient.
Also, to GP, the final projects are much preferred; they're more pleasant, more fun (since they're generally group assignments), survive for a while (particularly good projects)... In every way, the final project is
I applaud the University's declining final exam administration and change in norms. Final exams are an anachronism and don't belong in research universities.
There are small administrative changes made and reported all the time at universities. I know people love gossip about elite institutions and all, but seriously this is a pretty lame story.
Yes, mod me down as 'racist'. I don't mind.
But don't do it with Asians.
I'm teaching CS in one of the universities there, and everyone loves projects to replace finals. The students copy and paste, cheat, and outsource their projects almost throughout. And when I point this out to my colleagues, sorry, they scold me for failing the students. What to expect from staff that follow Asian copy-cat culture in their own publications, and do so - and this needs to be conceded - without any bad consciousness.
If the large majority of the students is motivated, willing to learn, eager to learn, curious, inquisitive, independent, I fully agree that exams can usually be done away with. But when you have a troop of llamas who care only about a great CGPA, with minimal effort, and no desire at all to do the learning part, doing away with exams simply doesn't work.
I have a BS in mechanical engineering. There are some simple problems any ME should be able to do because you will do them for the rest of your career. The ones you should know off the top of your head is how to calculate moments and deflections in simple beams. You should be able to find loads in static structures. You should be able to figure out simple dynamic problems. You should know how to figure out stresses in tension members, beams, and welds. When I interview for new hires these are the problems I give them. They should know these things. It isn't a matter of "Oh I could just look that up in a book". You spend 4 years studying you better know it.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I'd say that situation is unlikely. I've never seen a paper written in an hour up to par with one that has been written, rewritten, and edited to perfection. Show me a paper you wrote in an hour you feel is perfect, and I'll show you some corrections you need to make. If you think you're an exception, you're a) arrogant, and b) probably not a good writer.
I graduated from a good Engineering program in 1986, and as I recall we had final exams in every subject -- six per semester for four years. The one exception was the senior project, or thesis, where we had to do the work, prepare a final report and defend it to a panel of professors. Class size was well over 30 in the first 1.5 years, dropping to 30 or less after that.
My eldest child is entering a political science program next week. I've been told all classes will be around 300, and everyone brings laptops to class to take notes. I can't even imagine it. In our classes a professor who didn't accept interruptions was a bad professor. The flip side was that a student who raised too many interruptions was made to feel the error of his* ways.
* The use of the masculine pronoun is all-too appropriate, sadly for both us and the profession. I hope that at least has changed.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
As long as you pay for your 200k dollar degree, They could care less if your a retarded monkey. It's all about the money, nothing else.
And it is taking society in a wonderful direction.
As someone who has experienced the working world, I can tell you that if you're employed by someone other than yourself there's often no bonus points for efficiency, either. If you get more work done, you get assigned more work or you may actually get some extra free time between projects. In your review after a certain amount of time, you may get a raise or a promotion based in part on your efficiency. Your work defect rate being low within the assigned deadlines is far more important than getting done well ahead of deadlines, though.
If you're self-employed for contract work, you may get the same benefits for being efficient as the rapid student. If your work passes muster and you can do it faster than some other guy, you get either more free time as free time or more time to spend doing another project. You're still usually under no pressure to do the job substantially faster from the client, although sometimes that does happen because the client failed to plan ahead or their other contractor fell through. That's when you can charge and expedite fee, though. What the client wants is a workable solution within their deadline. If you can deliver early and move on to another client, that's more money, but you might prefer a break between clients sometimes. (Actually, don't deliver too early or they'll think they've overpaid. If your estimate was too long by too big a margin, hold back on delivery a bit but still deliver somewhat early.) You still have to go out and find that next client, though, so the extra time doesn't always become extra money even if you want it that way.
If you're manufacturing something, the biggest concern in efficiency is in the process. Taking a given amount of time to improve the process is fine. The manufacturer, except in rare situations, would rather you work to deadline to get a bigger efficiency gain in the manufacturing process than to get a small gain in the process well ahead of deadline. If you can easily implement a partial upgrade early and still get a bigger gain at the end of the project without a lot of extra downtime for the two separate implementations, then that might be worthwhile. In no case is a large-scale process owner going to be happy with just a 2% gain designed in two days if they gave you a month of engineering time. They'll want you to spend the rest of the month coming up with further process improvements whether you can implement them separately or not.
The only real-world situation that comes to mind in which efficiency always brings a direct monetary reward is sales. The faster you can close sales and actually collect on them, the faster you can make money. Even then, some salespeople would rather get the same amount of money in less time (after a point, of course) than more money in the same amount of time.
knowin what I am doin.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Yes. They spend two hours reviewing their work and so find all the silly errors that those who barely finish in time miss.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Plagiarism fail. You're supposed to at least change the name on the paper to your own!
You set harder problems.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
You have the same problem with written exams: how do you compare a student who knows the work intimately but froze in the exams with one who didn't study? Probably the only good things that you can say about written tests is that they are harder less effort to grade and harder to cheat at outright. They are notoriously easy to game by working old papers and such and present a totally unrealistic situation for most disciplines, with the added stress of ticking timer. Give me a good project and oral examination any day for quality assessment.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
For my BA: The first 2 years years worth of classes were almost all test based, with a class or two that had essays or some other sort of project.
My last 2 years was the opposite. All classes needed at least 15 pages total of typed essays with a few the required much more.
In grad school, all none lab based classes required at least 40 pages for work turned in for the semester and a few classes that required much much more. One class I turned in 120 pages of research notes. In another, I typed up a 16 page mock grant request. Single spaced, 10 point font. Not counting citations and the bibliography. On a whim, i convert it to a 12 font, double spaced paper and it came out to a little less then 60 pages. This was addition to the other work assign in that class. The kicker was that the class was worth only 1 credit and was required in my field of study. I earned an A- for that class.
My point? The further you go in academia, the more important essay writing becomes. Its better to ween students off multiple choice and short answer questions early on. Leave that stuff for high school.
With writing large checks to the endowment. Showed up to class? That should be worth 20%. Actually answered questions and participated? another 20%.
Physics: exams were belled to ~67% for each course. Typically the actual marks on the exam where below that (yeah tough). You needed a 65% average to remain in the program so ... every year the class shrank by 50%. Started with around 100, ended with less than 20. Good stuff.
People from China are usually hard work and really picky about small things. I work on a class project with a couple of Chinese people and I learn a lot of things.
People from India just know how to copy and paste, fake resumes, and scratch their feet on their job. You will never see a single Indian work for their paycheck. All they want is to show up and get the check. Having class projects with Indians was the worst experience I ever had.
New Economic Perspectives
Why would you care whether a student cheats himself out of an accurate measure of his understanding? The purpose is presumably feedback so he can improve his understanding where it's lacking, before he moves on in his studies.
In my college (Helsinki University of Technology), barely anybody attended lectures. A 500-page book can teach a topic much more clearly than most professors. Seminars you had to attend to but even there it was the reading material that contained all the information.
I was very happy with my school and felt like I was learning very efficiently. The professors had done a great job selecting the course books.
thankfully, RIT does not make you put up with this. Worst I ever had was a few dozen, and I've had a lot of much smaller groups.
The Rochester Institute of Tuition / Southern Henrietta Institute of Technology at least does not abuse class sizes and TA; in the few classes where TAs were invovled, they were a backup to most of the work being done by the regular prof
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
"Columbia requires all students to study the important books of the western cannon. "
Do they include Rommel's "Gefechts-Aufgaben für Zug und Kompanie : Ein Handbuch für den Offizierunterricht" (Combat tasks for platoon and company: A manual for the officer instruction)?
I know it's not cannon-centred, but surely such a classic must have been on the list somewhere?
And what about his "Infanterie greift an" (Infantry Attacks)?
Not much better
Aristotle is as relevant now as he was in his own time, perhaps more so.
Indeed, that the concepts are general and powerful enough to still be applicable thousands of years later is a quality indicator right there. I'm particularly fond of his virtuous mean concept myself.
Music has a somewhat similar factor on the timescale of a few centuries (Classical a la Bach et al) or a few decades (classic popular music such as The Beatles).
Computing accelerates this principle to a couple of decades
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The most actual final exams I had in college for a semester was 3, that was freshman year when I had mostly Gen Ed classes. Most of my exams were papers and projects due on or before exam day. I had a variety of teacher interviews (oral quizzes / discussions), a few exam day group projects, presentations (those were boring exams, 3 hours of listening to others), a large group discussion / debate. As a student most of these were better judges of my working knowledge of material tests, multiple choice especially, only show what you know they don't demonstrate your ability to use that knowledge. In my opening that renders them useless in many classes such as counseling, public speaking, etc.
Because the credential is the valuable thing, and often the student doesn't care about the knowledge. I took plenty of classes in college (to fulfill "distributional" requirements) that I didn't care about. I just wanted an easy A.
Harvard gives you financial AIDS for a Sumer course.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
In this case, a Harvard degree + 4 years of partying, paid for in full by Daddy Moneybags.
Harvard students know which side their bread is buttered on (with jam, please).
As long as the top journalists, captains of the industry and the top bureaucrats are all coming from the same pool, you would not see the rot brought about their group think.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When I teach Chem101, I typically do have a traditional final. Intro science courses lend themselves to it- the problems are usually short and don't require research or presentation skills, and there are a lot of students. For other sorts of courses, there are so many better ways to do a comprehensive evaluation- in my class this semester that's a ~12 page paper, poster session and half an hour of oral presentation and defense of their topic in class. They'll do a ton more work on that than they will studying for some 3 hour short essay final.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Nice. Sounds like I just buy a degree and get a tax deductible receipt. Now for a limited time it includes a toy.
Seriously though, I have had courses that had no "final". Usually had to do with working on one large project or thesis. However even at the end of those there would be a "defense" or "presentation" you were also marked on. Mind you they were not worth 40-60% like many finals more like 5-15%, but still there was some sort of evaluation other than just on the work done previously. Also I would have to say of all my classes I have ever taken at the University level, say of 40 total courses, maybe 3-4 were like that. Of those all of them were at the end of my degree (year 4/5).
To have 486 of 500 without finals just sounds retarded to me.
For Most Colleges the Comprehensive Final Exam is optional. Most colleges give several exams during the year and the then a comprehensive final. So by the time you take the final, you've already been tested on the material. So the final doesn't serve much of a purpose. Most professors will give a final as an option and allow you to swap out that test score, for a lesser test score.
The title is misleading. This is a non issue.
I did not go to Harvard, I went to UBC and got a degree in Electrical Engineering. Each of my classes needed to match an approximate bell curve for grades, my first year chemistry professor said as much. It was expected that only the top 20% would get an A-/A/A+, with the A+ only being achieved by less than the top 5% of the class. It does present an interesting problem, however, because to enroll in the engineering program at UBC when I did, an A average from high school was required, which was significantly higher then entrance averages had been 30 years prior, and there were 5 times as many applicants as compared to 30 years prior. What suprised me, or I suppose what I didn't expect, is that despite students having high grades, very few of them understood the material and were more prone to memorization. Now that I've been in the work world for a number of years I know this isn't just a symptom of UBC, but a problem at all universities. Grades don't accurately reflect a students understanding of the material, or more importantly, their ability to learn new material and apply it in unique ways.
Maybe competition at Harvard is more fierce, but the competition is to gain the highest grades, not produce the most novel new widget, or to glean a deeper understanding of the subject, or more importantly explore the subject in new and exciting ways. As a hiring manager I'm now weary of students from big schools with perfect GPA's. Some of those students are brilliant, and some of them have learned how to game the system really well, but most of them are missing the most important things: passion for the subject, and creativity.
So when grades are no longer a useful metric for industry, and are likely of little value to choosing the best post graduate students, what purpose do they serve. And why should we care if they're inflated...
OK, former art history Assistant Instructor here, 90-person intro lecture courses. (And whoever said they got a $50K stipend, I wish! We got $5K per course, at one course per semester, no stipend.) Typically, in my department, instead of a three-hour comprehensive (usually in addition to a one-hour mid-term) we gave three one-hour in-class exams, the last of which fell on the last day of class. Note that finals period was scheduled for a week later. In addition, there were 10-minute quizzes every two weeks, a 5-page essay assignment, and another assignment requiring you to go to the art museum and answer questions about various objects.
Part of the reason for not giving a comprehensive final was instructor fatigue, and the fact that both the instructor and the grader frequently had plans involving foreign travel that began before the finals period was over. But the biggie. I've decided, was simply getting together enough slides (images, these days) and questions about them, bearing in mind that you didn't want simply to recycle earlier material.
I used to have a dim view of final exams. I didn't like the fact that a large fraction (up to 70% depending on the class) of the grade came down to the performance on a single day, while homework assignments, on which I spent much more time, counted for so little. Now that I've taught classes myself, I always give a final exam, because that's the only work I can be absolutely sure that the students actually did themselves. I make it a relatively small fraction of the total grade (say 25%), with a provision that you must pass the final to pass the class (though I've never actually encountered a situation in which this had to be enforced). In this way, I can be sure that the students leave with at least a certain level of comprehension, while the grades are more heavily weighted toward the more work-intensive assignments. Obviously this won't work for everyone. My experience has been teaching various undergrad level astronomy / planetary science classes. And at state universities, not at Harvard. YMMV.
Don't professors generally assume that you took all the time available to you and didn't procrastinate?
Likely explains why they are a professor and not actually working in the real world.
Because when he leaves school with that degree, he's representing the university. If said university continually turns out dumb asses, its reputation will suffer. Lower reputation leads to less funding, less able to attract top professors, research dollars, etc. It's important for a university to take steps to ensure those who graduate from its halls are as educated as they're supposed to be.
I can't see how dropping finals is a good idea in academia. Sure you'll have occasional classes where large projects are submitted in the place of finals. But for the vast majority of classes, (especially lectures) finals serve a very useful purpose. They force students to reflect on all components of the class and to see how they fit together. And obviously one can't do that until the end of the course. I remember many times during my undergraduate years learning a great deal in preparation for the final exam. Not so much specific details but in recognizing "the big picture" of the course. By eliminating finals, Harvard is robbing its students of this important process (though I'm sure the students are thrilled at having to do less work).
I have always thought that when schools compete for students in a free market, the market will supply what the consumer demands: high grades for the least amount of effort.
I know it is more complicated than this, and I know that university prestige is an important characteristic in its "value", but the more I look at the school system today, the more I am convinced that education is being increasingly seen as an economic good, something that has value only in its potential to increase future income. The value of an education to intellectually and spiritually enrich a person's life, and by connection the lives of all citizens is I believe being neglected. I believe that our education is increasingly being plagued by something called "credentialism", where the credential, the piece of paper is valued more than the knowledge and wisdom it is supposed to represent. I believe that this will result in the hollowing out of our educational system resulting eventually in social and economic decay.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Harvard has simply returned to its roots as a school primarily concerned with teaching theology. They have simply traded the old boring Christian theology for Marxist socialism (all the benefits of a priesthood with no pesky God looking over your shoulder!). People go to Harvard for Grievance Studies, Social Management of the Proletariat, etc - and in these fields, like any other seminary, your "achievement" is measured by orthodoxy and commitment to conversion/conquest of infidels. Final written exams are as unnecessary, and even undesirable, as traits like critical analysis or independent thinking. To the extent that Harvard is concerned at all with boring subjects like science or engineering, it is strictly to train right-thinking Managers, who will control these dangerous but sometimes necessary proles, and ensure that technology is always subordinated to the supreme needs of the Socialist elite.
I don't think i could handle that. I mean assuming 5 classes, that is 15 days of work. Usually final exams all occur at the same time (two weeks at the end of the semester). So 3 hours per class comes out to 15 hours of exams. And generally the exams can be finished early as long as you studied enough with some time to double check. I think if I only have two weeks to do exams for 5 classes that take 3 days each that I would fail out of college.
Anyway in many math classes i can see exams (in math based computer science courses as well). But many other types of courses would benefit from a final paper/project. Ie for information retrieval build a mini search engine. For data mining, data mine some stuff... For operating systems, create a kernel module for linux which involves using semaphores, the file system, etc... And for a history/literature class a paper may work best
Cambridge (and presumably Oxford) suffer from the same type of comparison. However if you compare their 1st class degree fraction with the A level grades (when those meant something) of their intake they have a far lower rate of 1st class degrees than other UK universities. The result was that they ended up being criticised for both having too high and too low a number of 1st class degrees at the same time! I think the principle they employed was that if they could here both sets of complaints with equal volume they were probably about right.
So if 97% of students with 3A's at A-level (or whatever you American's use) when they enter university graduate nationally and Harvard only takes students with 3A's then there is no problem despite the very high graduation rate.
Don't professors generally assume that you took all the time available to you and didn't procrastinate?
No, because we were once undergraduate students ourselves!
Also, to GP, the final projects are much preferred; they're more pleasant, more fun...
The question you should be asking is are they better at assessing a student's knowledge of the course material than a final exam? It's great to try and make learning as fun and as pleasant as possible but that is a secondary concern to the learning itself (although the two are not entirely independent). Would you rather go to a doctor with a great bedside manner who was barely competent vs. one who might not be friendly but really knew their medicine?
I applaud the University's declining final exam administration and change in norms.
Applauding change for its own sake is extremely unwise. I find it extremely suspect that nowhere in the article do I see any argument that finals are being dropped to improve the student's education, only that they are being dropped because they are unpopular....which suggests that perhaps the inmates are starting to run the asylum.