Harvard Ditching Final Exams? 371
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.'"
Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Fewer exams doesn't necessarily mean fewer finals. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fewer exams doesn't necessarily mean fewer fina (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
"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..
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't go to Hahvahd
I see that you have never been to Boston either. Only a relatively small percentage of Bostonians drop their Rs. And not many of those people can afford to go to Harvard.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
Harvard can pick only the best students (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Bring back the oral exam (Score:3, Insightful)
Best of all, it doesn't take 3 hours per student.
But even in a small class of 20, if it takes a half hour per student, that's 10 hours for the professor.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:1, Insightful)
"What's the point in teaching a 200 person class?"
The point is that it's a lot cheaper while still feasible if you *teach* and they do their damn job and *learn*. When, after their hard learning work, they still have doubts they come to you, one by one, out of class time, and you explain them personally from a different angle.
"The whole fucking point of a professor is to INTERACT with the students."
Not. That's what our current moronic spoon-feeding society thinks, wants and expects. The whole fucking point of a professor is to TEACH. Students are already quite good by themselves about INTERACTing... in campus parties.
Re:Bring back the oral exam (Score:2, Insightful)
Or with a 10 minute oral assessment, it would only take 4 working days.
An oral assessment would grade presentation ability which is irrelevant to course content. Why make the rain-man do a presentation on differential integrals? He'd fail!
and this is relevant to Slashot because... (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bring back the oral exam (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Unless you videorecord them all (and I'm not sure how many examining professors would like to themselves be recorded as they mark every student every year), it's a bit harder to deal with appeals processes. And these days universities do have to have appeals processes.
Re:Fewer exams doesn't necessarily mean fewer fina (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. They spend two hours reviewing their work and so find all the silly errors that those who barely finish in time miss.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:3, Insightful)
I've never met anyone who thought a college degree was qualification to do anything. My MS EE represented that I spent a lot of time studying electrical engineering, but I sure as hell wasn't qualified to design or manufacture chips or circuit boards.
The degree isn't worthless, I learned a lot of things that help me pick up real qualifications, and new technologies that help me stay relevant in the changing world...but it didn't qualify me for anything.
And that's really the point, I paid attention, I've used the learning I picked up to my advantage. I don't need a final exam/project/pat on the head to prove that to myself. It has always been to my advantage to learn as much as I can while I can.
The question of setting up a way to measure my fitness to a particular function is one that colleges are admitting they really have no inkling on. If you go to med school or you go to law school, you are taught by practicing professionals in your area of expertise, how to do your job (and in med school you have residency, the ultimate on the job training). They're preparing you to do a real job. Not so much for most other careers, degree and a GPA is it, and what those degrees and GPAs mean has been increasingly arbitrary for quite a while.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:3, Insightful)
Not true. Most colleges deny shitloads of fully qualified applicants because they simply don't have enough room. This isn't an accident, this is intentional. The more students that a school rejects, the better they are. A huge impediment to attending harvard is the fact that they need to be seen as "selective" in order for their diplomas to be given way more weight than they deserve.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:2, Insightful)
the difference between brilliant coder, and brilliant at paying someone else to code for them is hard to check for.
No, it is not. In fact it's suprisingly easy to check, easier than check for cheating on written exam. I know three good methods:
The last one works best at Objective Programming, but not only.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:prove it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bring back the oral exam (Score:3, Insightful)
One of my favorite past professors said that he would like to, but he simply doesn't have the time even for a moderately-sized class.
His exams were atleast really intelligently assembled essay questions though, pressed somewhat for time.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:3, Insightful)
What, you mean you don't want a doctor with no more than a high school education? ;)
Oh don't worry, we only let them learn on the job with the patients that are really old anyways.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:3, Insightful)