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.'"
one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't go to Hahvahd, but I have sometimes had professors count big final projects instead of a big final written exam.
Sometimes the class content just isn't amenable to written exams.
Bring back the oral exam (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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's wrong with drive through degrees?
Most jobs out there really need vocational training, but in the US that's tantamount to telling your child to go be a ditch digger (even if Med school and Law school are really just post-graduate vocational training). Instead we send them to Universities and tell our friends which University our child attends, where they drink, fuck and dig themselves in to debt for 3-4 years. Then, with their BA or BS, they march forth into the working world, expecting to learn everything important on the job. Why not just simplify this into a "here is your degree, now don't stick gum under the desk" approach. To a large extent corporations not only are OK with this, but encourage more of it with ever increasing degree requirements!
It's true that GPA is often requested by employers, but students have demonstrated a willingness to lie, cheat and steal (for decades) to get the GPA they need, so really this final exam thing is a formality anyway. The professors are there to research, why waste more time on a broken process that accomplishes nothing?
Re:Fewer exams doesn't necessarily mean fewer fina (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't professors generally assume that you took all the time available to you and didn't procrastinate?
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:3, Interesting)
I've done comp sci and physics, and 4-5 things in a class is about normal. I'm teaching a course this year that will be 4 assignments and a final. I'm not thrilled at having a final, but when the class is big enough that you don't really know the students the only way to know if a student actually did any of the work they claimed is to test them on it, in class. On the other hand I'm not going to ask 3D game engine code in class time. It's a tricky balance, since brilliant coders may not be any good at tests, but the difference between brilliant coder, and brilliant at paying someone else to code for them is hard to check for.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Interesting)
200 person classes are typically freshman, state-required (for state college board accreditation) weed-out classes. i.e. worthless classes that would 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.
If you're in a 200 person class for junior and senior level classes, you're either at a degree mill, you've pissed off your advior/dean, or both.
I agree - for bright students in Ivy-League (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Harvard can pick only the best students (Score:5, Interesting)
No they don't. I live across the river from Harvard, where I regularly interact with students. Harvard is a good school with a great brand, nothing more, nothing less. If anything, the students at Harvard suffer from a very strong peer norming pressure, where they come to believe they deserve the ridiculous opportunities (without validation) that the Harvard brand affords them. The professional schools (law, business) are the worst in this respect; the graduate programs (ie, Arts & Sciences) are the most likely to produce a human being who produces in proportion to their consumption. I think it is a shame that the school is following the assumption "once you are accepted into Harvard, you are already successful by definition, and you no longer have to perform." Isn't the point of schooling to educate, not to certify? How can education work without performance feedback?
MIT is a different story. While there are clearly many opportunities and the MIT brand is also powerful, in general, the typical student at MIT is more interested in proving themselves rather than just taking advantage of the brand. Maybe my experience is limited, but by now, n > 100.
It just irks me that so many people perpetuate the myth that Harvard or MIT is some blessed land of the talented. Disclosure: my undergraduate degree was from a state university; my PhD was Ivy...I speak from experience.
Re:Fewer exams doesn't necessarily mean fewer fina (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:I agree - for bright students in Ivy-League (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I agree - for bright students in Ivy-League (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose if they are brought up in a society where no one owns any ideas, blatantly copying entire works doesn't seem like a wrong thing to do.
Actually, being a GPL-FOSS-etc. person, I don't agree fully with you; nobody should own an idea. If only, because his/her idea is based on numerous ideas of others, who had all those ideas needed as basis.
Maybe we can agree on the term owe instead? If one uses an idea, any idea, a phrase, a drawing, that isn't one's very own, one owes it to the originator, to mention one's source(s).
Re:prove it (Score:5, Interesting)
"Harvard University is the poster campus for academic prestige - and for grade inflation, even though some of its top officials have warned about grade creep. About 15 percent of Harvard students got a B-plus or better in 1950, according to one study. In 2007, more than half of all Harvard grades were in the A range. Harvard declined to release more current data or officially comment for this article."
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2008/10/05/doesnt_anybody_get_a_c_anymore/ [boston.com]
"Plus, tough grading makes a student less likely to get into graduate school, which could make Harvard look bad in college rankings."
and also from that article this interesting bit:
"Fewer than 20% of all college students receive grades below a B-minus, according to a study released this week by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. That hardly seems justified at a time when a third of all college students arrive on campus so unprepared that they need to take at least one remedial course."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2002/02/08/edtwof2.htm [usatoday.com]
Or how about a student testimonial:
"The article reported a record 91% of Harvard University students were awarded honors during the spring graduation. Said one student, Trevor Cox, "I've coasted on far higher grades than I deserve. It's scandalous. You can get very good grades and earn honors, without ever producing quality work."
http://www.endgradeinflation.org/ [endgradeinflation.org]
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:3, Interesting)
lots and lots of really hard take-home problems.
Please, for your students sanity, small numbers of very hard problems is better than lots and lots of problems of any difficulty.
Actually, I completely agree with you. I was oversimplifying in my original post, partially for brevity, and partially because if I describe too much more about myself then I will loose what little anonymity is available here.
I assign a lot of hard problems, but I don't require my students to do all of them. I will usually have a small number of problems that I want everyone to do, then I'll let the students pick from the others. For example, I might have 10 hard problems on a weekly assignment. I'll indicate 3-4 problems that I want everyone to do, then I might have the students pick 1-2 others to work. So, a given student might only have to work 5 problems, but when we present the problems in class everyone has the advantage of seeing a solution to each problem worked out.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Interesting)
Good luck with your PhD!
Of course, I was generalizing. Different people learn in different ways. What I have observed seems to apply to most, but certainly not all, students.
One of the reasons I don't bother taking attendance is because I know that there are some students who will learn perfectly well on their own. As long as they are doing well in the class, there is no reason to force them to show up.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:1, Interesting)
Are you fucking insane? No college would ever give out lots of 4.0s. The reason for this is that the more students they fail, the better they look. People assume that failing means that the college is too hard for you and not a result of a curve that FORCES a certain percentage of failures. Any college that inflates its grades would be laughed out of a position of legitimacy in a matter of days. I'd be surprised if more than a larger than average number of people graduated from harvard with 4.0s.
Unless you can back up your assertions with actual statistics, I'm calling bullshit.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Harvard can pick only the best students (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:3, Interesting)
It depends a bit on the assignment, and I'm being somewhat glib. We have lots of ways we check for cheating, exams are part of that.
Generally, in courses where I'm the TA, I know if a student has cheated right away on an assignment. You know them, you know their level of competence, and if everything is inconsistent with that, you know something is fishy. But I don't have the money (ie people time) to police every line of code in every programming project. Even deleting the code and asking them to reproduce just means they figured it out after they were given a solution by someone else. The gap between knowing what to do, and knowing why it works can be pretty big. We're hopefully preparing people to know what to do, but it never quite works as planned.