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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.'"
Usually in classes of this sort, the grade is based on Project work and assignments that are completed.
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.
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.
There are teaching assistants and smaller "discussion" sections in which to interact and grade papers.
otherwise require you to hire an extra six entry level professors ($400,000, plus benefits = about half a million dollars) to handle the teaching load. Assuming an average class size of 30.
Instead they hire 6 grad students at about $50,000 (stipend + tuition) a year with no benefits to teach the classes. I'm fine with this of course, since it's paying for my education. I'm a TA for two 30 student sections of a 200 student course. It's introductory engineering, and I find it very rewarding, since I'm one of their first real contacts at the university. I'm only a few years older than them, and I think they can relate to me better than the stodgey old professor in the giant lecture hall.
That's less true at Harvard (and to a lesser extent MIT) than it has been in the past, if you're accepted they make a real effort to get you in at a cost you can afford and with minimal (or in Harvard's case, no) loans
From the page I linked:
I'm sure there are a handful of people who will have financial problems, but for the vast majority of students, the only impediment to attending Harvard is their academic performance.
There are teaching assistants and smaller "discussion" sections in which to interact and grade papers.
Ah, I work at a lowly school. We don't have teaching assistants. The professors do all the teaching, all the discussing, and all of the grading.
Of course, in grad school I was one of those TAs leading discussion sections like you've just described. What I realized then was that most of the learning took place either in the discussion sessions or while the students were working on their homework. Really, those giant lectures could have been video presentations and it wouldn't have made any difference to the students.
This is an interesting portion of your comment. I'm a lawyer, and while law school was less nuts&bolts than you might think, the law school experience was quite a bit different than college. When I look back on it, law school isn't exactly hard, it's just grueling, kind of like walking across Texas in the summer would be. College was a whole lot more fun because the volume of information required to get through was so much smaller. Another interesting thing about law school was the number of unhappy people who were used to sliding easily into A grades, endlessly whining about their C- grades at the end of the first semester.
Back on topic, I wonder what law school would have been like without finals. Nice profs would give a midterm and final. Most simply gave a final exam at the end of the semester. Talk about performance anxiety -- blow the one test and blow the class. On the other hand, you literally can blow a case with one forgotten question to a key witness (*) so being put on the spot like that was sort of primer for real life.
(*) It doesn't usually happen, but I cruised to an easy win once after a plaintiff rested (I didn't even have to present my case) because opposing counsel forgot to ask a doctor whether his opinion was expressed on a "more probable than not probable" certainty level. Had he asked just one more question, there would have been an issue for the jury to decide, but because he forgot, my motion to dismiss was granted and the jury sent home. Miss a key magic phrase and you lose. Now that's some serious testing.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Does anyone know the percentage of Harvard students that graduate cum laude? Magna cum laude? Summa cum laude?
(Hint: 50% graduate with these "rare" honors.)
Anyone care to guess what the average GPA is for a Harvard grad?
Why oh why did I have to go to school somewhere they didn't inflate grades? Studying makes college so much more challenging than it needs to be, apparently.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Not because I say so, because of the arguments I laid forth in my reply.
I wonder what percentage of administrators, professors and students at other universities also speak of grade inflation. Maybe less, maybe more, but I don't see why Harvard is getting singled out. You say "various studies have demonstrated this to be true." What studies?
Don't be intellectually lazy. If you just google the term, you might find the Wiki page chock full of references -- for the ADHD crowd, here's a page with lots of easy-to-understand charts
The conclusion: Grade inflation is massive, even if you try to adjust for purported quality increases by using SAT results. It happened across all private schools (with the notable exception of Princeton, who put in some radical measures to curb it in 2004) as well as most public schools. Harvard is not exceptional.
I teach two sections of 30 students. My hard commitment is 2 1 hr labs and 2 hrs of office hours per week. I should supposedly be spending 20 hours a week on TA duty, (teaching, preparing, grading, dealing with student questions) but supposedly in practice it's much less (I say supposedly because it's only the first week)
The math works out as follows: Tuition is $1000 per credit, and 9 credits is a full load, so tuition is $9,000 per semester. I get paid $2,500 per month with my stiped, including the summer, so that comes out to $48,000 a year.
I've found this practice of paying full tuition to be pretty standard among PhD programs in the sciences and engineering. Thing are usually different for Masters and Liberal Arts.
Universities, especially big-name ones like the Ivys, hate giving out low grades. So they don't. They get most of their money from tuition and alumni grants, and pumping the grades up keeps these two groups happy and paying out. This is particularly endemic at the graduate levels.
And, seriously, you need references? Is Google broken? 5 seconds:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2008/10/05/doesnt_anybody_get_a_c_anymore/
In 1950, 15% of students at Harvard got a B+ or higher. In 2007, >50% were A or higher.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/2/13/c-minus-prof-to-give-more-as/
"I was very delighted that I would find out what he thinks of my true performance while not hurting my transcript,"