The Fall of the Final

Last week, The Boston Globe ran an article about the decline of the final exam. Professors, it seems, are increasingly omitting final examinations at the end of their courses. The conclusion, although anecdotal, is that this is happening not in a few isolated places, but all around the country. Harvard offers a case study. According to the Globe, last spring only 259 of 1,137 Harvard undergraduate courses scheduled final exams, the lowest number since 2002. The Times‘ “Today’s idea” section repeated the story a few days ago, including the caveat that “serious pedagogical questions about 21st century education” are raised by the decline in giving finals. The questions that are inevitably dragged into the discussion are,  “How best do students learn? And what’s the best way to assess that?”

Educators are obsessed with pinning down the answer to “How are students best educated?”  Yet the endless research is leading nowhere. Why? Because education is not a binary realm of “either/or.”  There is no True/False answer to the question, “How best do students learn?” Nor can someone come up with a bubble exam, where educators can choose the correct answer to this question. There are multiple ways students (bad and good) learn, and there are multiple ways professors (bad and good) teach. Moreover, there are multiple instances where a final examination may be a good thing, and multiple instances where it may be a silly thing.

Many people are surprised to learn that in my beginning painting class, I give a written midterm exam, consisting of True/False questions, fill-in-the-answer questions, and choose-from-among-the-following answers quesetions.  Students who fail to score higher than 70 out of 100 points get a second shot—they get to take a final examination covering the same material. If they fail to pass that exam, they fail the course—no matter how well they’ve done in fulfilling the individual assignments.

Why do this in a “studio skills” course”? Because, believe me, the stick of the final examination makes painting students shudder, and those few who fail to pass the midterm invariably perform in stellar fashion on the final. I need to know that students I’m sending on to further study of painting, or even out into the world where they’ll never touch it again, understand such things as color intensity, or tonality, or the fundamentals of how to control mixing pigment to achieve certain effects. The other stuff—the “how good is this painting?”—I leave for individual discussion with students and group classroom critiques. Painting is simultaneously partly subjective (I can’t prove to students that particular paintings are good—although curiously, they’re the first to recognize the best projects during a critique) and objective (sorry, but that yellow isn’t as bright as you think it is).

I vastly prefer teaching (and rewarding, via grades) talentless painting students who demonstrate an understanding of the elements that go into making a painting than talented painting students who slide along on their talent and don’t know how to talk about such things as color. (Of course, it goes without saying that it’s a beautiful moment when talent and understanding go hand-in-hand.) The final examination, in my case, is a nifty little tool.