Last week the Alberta School Board Association, which represents all primary and secondary school boards in Alberta, voted to reduce the weighting of the standardized grade 12 ‘Diploma Exams’ taken by all students from the current 50% down to 30% of the final grade. The decision still must be approved by the province, but it is a major victory in the push to reduce the weighting of the two-hour finals. The exams, which were first introduced as a method to reduce grade inflation caused by subjective teacher marking, have been criticized over the years for creating a culture of cramming for the exam instead of learning the content and for causing excessive and undue stress. Frank Bruseker, president of the Alberta Teacher’s Association’s Calgary chapter, was quoted by CBC as saying the change would “…motivate the students to work harder and really get into their studies… [thereby helping] them to improve their mark on the final exam.”
The Alberta Diploma Exams are in many ways similar to university finals, in particular engineering finals; both have very high weightings, though university finals can be weighted even higher. The university exams also encourage cramming and generate huge amounts of stress, and, just like the Alberta exams, they are weighted far too high. The important part of getting a university degree is not your ability to memorize, but the experience and knowledge you receive, and your ability to synthesize new information. Exams, which focus on your performance over a short time, are a much less fair and accurate rating of students’ abilities than other methods of grading such as reports and labs.
Going to university and getting a degree is an important part of many people’s careers, especially in a program like engineering where your future professional decisions could have disastrous consequences. A large part of the benefit is that the knowledge and experience you acquire can be incredibly helpful to your future success. The ability to write effective exams is not, generally, one of those benefits. For starters, everyone has the ability to look up things that they don’t know; why are you punished by being unable to do that in an exam? Sure, you have to know the content of the class in order to make the important aforementioned synthesis from your academic knowledge, but the emphasis currently put on content by finals worth 40 or 50% is far too high. Some courses like calculus are not easily adapted to a more diverse grading portfolio. Others, like the electromechanical course ME 269, are; in this course there are 5 labs, 5 quizzes, and 2 major assignments. But the final is still worth 50%. The labs, I would argue, are severely under-emphasized; in order to complete them, you not only need a good understanding of the mathematics, but the theory as well to explain the lab results. That ability to carry out and interpret experiments is much more relevant than the ability to write a test.
One of the major advantages of final exams is that—baring cheating—they are exclusively the student’s own work, thereby allowing teachers to test the knowledge of each student, rather than that student and his or her friends. Reducing the weighting of the final, however, does not eliminate the ability to test this. Firstly, the final will still have some weight, and a student who gets by with the help of their friends will still be severely penalized. Secondly, smaller quizzes can also be used to test within this parameter. In any case, even a final doesn’t necessarily test the knowledge of each student individually, but rather the ability to cram. As Calgary student Eric Rogers says regarding his Alberta Diploma Exam: “as long as you spend 48 hours straight studying, smacking your face with a textbook, you’ll get the answers right and you’ll still pass the class.” In that regard, reports and labs are a superior method of testing a student’s ability in the course because they can force students to move beyond reiteration and to create new conclusion, something which can only be done if one is already proficient with the concepts. This, along with services such as Turnitin which checks for plagiarism, allows a more diverse weighting system to continue to test a student’s true knowledge of the course.
The greatest issue with finals being so heavily weighted in your mark is that is puts undue stress on students. In just a few hours, your entire academic fate can be decided; pass or failure can have huge ramifications. It’s not appropriate stress, and students already have plenty of opportunity to learn how to deal with stress as they try to balance studying, job hunting, assignments, and a social life. Even worse, the time when the exam occurs is arbitrary and does not take your schedule into account. Maybe you don’t have time to study because you have a job interview or a family gathering. You can try to plan your time well and get as much studying done as you can, but external factors which are unavoidable and not grounds for a rescheduling of your final can have a huge impact on your grade. Furthermore, some people just don’t test well; they can be too anxious or have difficulty communicating while under pressure. In reports and long-term assignments you can work around these difficulties, having more time and flexibility to plan with. As much as anything else, a final exam measures a lot of what your life is like at that moment, with no consideration how you would have performed under more average circumstances.
Final exams are an important part of school, and provide some important attributes in assessing students’ ability, specifically the ability to test exclusively the student’s knowledge of the concepts. However, these same factors can be assessed by reports and labs which require synthesis of new information by the student. Furthermore, the marks which come from reports can be a better indicator of the true success of the student, and emphasizing the weighting of such grade-sources over exams encourages actual learning over blind memorization. The current emphasis on the final exam is unhealthy, creating stress and putting some students at a disadvantage either because of inconvenient timing or a lack of proficiency with the exam-writing format. While the finals should not be abolished altogether, the assessment of students could be much improved by diversifying the source of marks used in grading.
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