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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.'"
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/
grading students on how much they get done, and never testing them on knowing why they did the things they got done in the way they did, or better yet how they should have got them done, is not higher education. it's tech school.
Easy, one is good at doing work and the other will be their manager. I'll let you figure out who is who.
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?
Well, I am a math professor (although at a much lowlier school than Harvard) and I've never had a great opinion of in-class testing. The simple fact is that in the short duration of an in-class test you can't give the students substantive problems to work on. Thus, in-class tests (or any other short-duration timed test) is really an exercise in "how quickly can you work lots of relatively shallow problems".
I far prefer to give my students lots and lots of really hard take-home problems. I call on them randomly in class to present their solutions at the board and explain their work. This is virtually cheat-proof... if you copy from someone, then it is obvious when I'm quizzing you at the board to prove your assertions. The only draw back of this method is that it takes a lot of effort on the professor's part, and it's only feasible on reasonably-sized classes. I can't do this when I'm teaching a 30-student class of freshman calculus.
My guess is that Harvard is the type of place where class size isn't an issue. When you've got really small classes (under 10 students) then you can really gauge the knowledge level of each student because you are engaging each one individually in every class meeting. That's the ideal learning environment, but it's expensive.
"it's only feasible on reasonably-sized classes. I can't do this when I'm teaching a 30-student class of freshman calculus."
30 students is a lot? I guess it wouldn't work with 200 then..
???? What drive thru degrees????? Many of my grad level courses involved final projects instead of exams. There's still a huge crunch at the end of semester, but it's about the project instead of the exam. Exams are useful for testing theoretical knowledge in mature fields -- such as diff eq or stochastics -- but projects are better tests of applying said theoretical knowledge in an emerging field that a seminar might cover.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
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.
"it's only feasible on reasonably-sized classes. I can't do this when I'm teaching a 30-student class of freshman calculus."
30 students is a lot? I guess it wouldn't work with 200 then..
What's the point in teaching a 200 person class? You can't interact with them at all, you can't actually grade their papers, and you can't judge the knowledge of a student in any meaningful way. Universities that run ridiculous classes like that are just stealing the students' money and wasting the professor's time. The professor might as well just video the lectures and put them on the web... which I think is what Khan is doing.
The whole fucking point of a professor is to INTERACT with the students.
It's funny, because if you're a white, middle-class male you're automatically exempt from like 90% of the free money for college, and yet like 90% of the kids I go to school with are white, middle-class males.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
That's not just college, it's true for life in America in general. The basic principle is that you pay for something because you want more of it. Also, tax breaks are just another type of subsidy. It seems that the government wants more unsuccessful black people, more broken families, more poverty, more women working outside of the home, and more artificially large businesses. I would have thought Harvard would be more accepting of white middle-class males than the rest of our society.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
I chose this comment to reply to as it was your most recent.
The stuff you've been posting through this thread about your methods, insights, and experiences is really, really interesting to a fledgling PhD student, and you've put a lot of effort into composing clear, well-phrased replies to a number of questions. I just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to put it into writing; people like you are what keep me coming back to this site, because by God there are honestly intelligent people out there willing to talk about interesting stuff.
Anyway. That's all I've got.
"Given that most students only show up to school to get a degree to fill a job requirement line item, and will neither use the knowledge they allegedly collected nor attempt to apply it"
What are you basing this on? Let's say you want to be a mechanical engineer. Let's say I design a part for a satellite that's being launched next year. How do you determine whether or not a design I give you will withstand the forces of a launch? What do I use to damp the high frequency vibrations that the optics package won't tolerate during launch?
These are very real problems that thousands of engineers are actually working on every day. This isn't some stupid thought problem that no one has to deal with. To solve the problem you need to know calculus, mechanics of materials, statics, physics, etc. Where do they teach this info on-the-job? Name a single company that teaches you how to design satellite parts without any knowledge beyond 12th grade and I'll eat my fucking hat.
People like you assume that every single degree is worthless. Your child, or yourself, got a degree in business, or art, or history, found that no one would pay you thousands of dollars to sit around on your ass critiquing other people's work and came to the nonsense conclusion that EVERY degree is worthless. I mean, your art degree doesn't let you do anything useful, how could an engineering degree be any different? You passed all of your classes by skipping lectures and showing up drunk or stoned to every test, how could an engineering degree be any more difficult to obtain? You fucked the teacher to pass a class, how could a real college be any different?
Seriously, you need to fucking think for a little bit before deciding that "EVERY DEGREE IS WORTHLESS AND COLLEGE IS AN ENTIRELY BROKEN SYSTEM". I don't think that college is flawless and I DO actually think that there's a huge push for everyone to obtain college degrees regardless of whether or not they need them. However, you cannot assume that because there's a small set of people that have worthless degrees that no one has a real one.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Anyone who tells you there's grade inflation at Harvard is lying.
Because you said so?
Harvard administrators said they are inflating grades.
Harvard professors said they are inflating grades.
Harvard students said their grades were inflated.
Various studies have demonstrated this to be true.
Besides, use some common sense: Harvard has been a highly sought after ivy league school for a few generations... are you really arguing that the class of 2007 are really that much more "fucking amazing" than the class of 1997? Yet the class of 2007 has a lot more A students than any class in the 90s.
There's not a single student at Harvard who got an A or an A- (they don't give out A+'s) who didn't deserve it. Granted, it's hard to get a C grade, but that's to be expected considering how fucking amazing these students are.
Many of our politicians - congressmen and senators are harvard alums; do they strike you as particularly erudite? Does 'fucking amazing' leap to your mind? Harvard grads trend towards success because they come often from successful families before they ever enrolled, and they often build invaluable social networks while enrolled. The education itself is certainly good quality but its nothing special, and the students aren't really all that 'fucking amazing' either.