The ideal notion of a final exam is simple enough: you, the student, have spent an entire semester in my class studying subject X, and now I, the professor, will quiz you on the most important material you have learned to make sure that you have, in fact, learned something useful about subject X.
Fair enough. Quiz away.
The reality, however, is often far less rosy: you, the student, have spent an entire semester in my class studying subject X, and now I will quiz you on everything since the last midterm relating to the subject (although I will tell you that the exam is, in fact, cumulative), make the exam worth half of your grade or more and ask you questions on whatever strikes my fancy just so that I have some measuring stick with which to assign grades.
This is, of course, an extreme scenario but, unfortunately, also one that we have all experienced. But we should not have to. It is our right, as students, to be given fair and relevant final exams that appropriately reflect what we've learned and are not just a measuring stick for assigning grades but rather an experience to reflect and refresh our knowledge on a particular subject.
Here's how:
First, if an exam is not cumulative, we should not be told that it is. In one of my Wharton core classes, the TA told my class that the final would be cumulative and that we should know all the material from before the midterm. I called his bluff and studied only the material after the midterm. My friend, meanwhile, put in another six hours of study to review everything from before the midterm. Not surprisingly, the exam had not a single question relating to material from before the midterm, and I got a higher grade on the final since my friend misallocated his study time and got less sleep as a result of heeding the TA's faulty advice. This is unconscionable. We should not be made to study everything for an exam that only reflects a part of what we've learned, since doing so hinders our ability to study the material that really matters for the exam, not to mention our chances of getting a good night's sleep.
However, the problem with non-cumulative finals is that their weight often does not accurately reflect the amount of material that they cover. Say that you are in a class with a midterm in the beginning of October, another near the middle of November and a final in December. If the final is non-cumulative, then it only covers the material you've learned in the last month of class and therefore certainly should not be weighed any more than the second midterm nor constitute a gargantuan 50 percent or more of your final course grade. Yet professors often do assign more weight to non-cumulative finals simply because they are finals, needlessly inflating their importance and raising our stress levels. Simple solution: if a final exam is nothing more than another midterm, it should be weighted as such.
Most importantly, final exams should be relevant to the most important material that we've learned in a class. The most meaningful final exam that I've ever had was in one of my philosophy classes, in which the professor asked the class to identify key passages taken from our readings that were discussed in lecture and/or in recitation and briefly comment on their relevance to the course content. In fact, the exam was so relevant to our semester-long coursework that I had already unknowingly studied for it by doing the reading and attending class. The least relevant final exam that I've ever taken was in one of my finance classes, in which an entire semester of learning -- save for some perfunctory multiple-choice questions -- came down to a monstrous problem in which I had to calculate when a business should replace an old machine with a new one. I do not care. I do care, however, about dividend policy, pricing stocks and bonds, operational and financial leverage and other important material that will actually matter in my business career but that the professor did not see fit to test me on in a meaningful manner. These two examples illustrate that it should be the most important take-aways from class, rather than whatever textbook problem will keep students busy the most, that should be emphasized on final exams. Sadly, as with cumulative coverage and exam weighting, this if often not the case, and so our final exams continue to be, more often than not, exercises in memorization and regurgitation, followed by a subsequent wish to forget all that one has learned in preparation for the exam. Indeed, the ideal falls far from reality.
Cezary Podkul is a junior Management and Philosophy major in Wharton and the College from Chicago, Ill. Cezary Salad appears on Mondays.
