Don’t Move Final Exams – Remove Them

When I asked my son how his first final exam went, he shook his head and told me, “I am done with it. I don’t remember anything.” While I hope this is not entirely true; he will have the second semester of that class to deal with, it is true that the trivia on final exams leaves kids’ brains as rapidly as they leave the room.

I just finished reading Most Likely To Succeed, which makes the argument that our content-based educational system is obsolete. The authors, Tony Wager and Ted Dintersmith, describe an experiment run by the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, “When students returned after summer vacation, they were asked to retake the final exam they had completed three months earlier. Actually, it was a simplified version of the final, as the faculty eliminated any detailed questions that students shouldn’t be expected to remember a few months later. The results were stunning. When students took the final in June, the average grade was a B+ (87%); when the simplified test was taken in September, the average grade was an F (58%)” (Wagner and Dintersmith).

If the material in finals often doesn’t stick with students and is often irrelevant to anything they will do in the future, why do we make them memorize this minutia and regurgitate it back?

As I greeted students in the hall after my first final this year, and I asked them how they felt about their first test, many told me that their teacher had already graded it! The finals session had ended less than twenty minutes ago. It would take me a week to finish grading all the writing my students did! If a teacher doesn’t have to think to grade the test, how important can it be?  While there are ways to make multiple-choice tests meaningful, students are studying facts, words, and other bits of information that they could easily look up on the supercomputers in their pockets!

Many teachers finish the quarter with large unit or chapter tests the week before finals and then test on the same content on the final exam. Why test twice? Why beat up a kid with a ton of material on Thursday only to test again for even higher stakes the following Tuesday? How much learning happened in those four days? Did they go over the first test in the meantime? It is double jeopardy.

Many teachers are still using a percentage based grading system which makes the cost of making mistakes high. In our school, almost all finals count for twenty percent of the semester grade. In my experience as a parent and a teacher, finals don’t help students’ grades at all. Either the final simply strengthens what they were already earning, or it hurts their grades – and for kids on the grade bubble, finals frequently push their grades down. One test! One big long test (that will not stick with them) is what makes the difference!  

Should one seventy-five-minute test be equal to four weeks of class experience? Should it count as much? Can we put what is really important, relevant, and meaningful into it and then grade it in five minutes?

My finals are skill based. My freshmen read a story and then write about it. They demonstrate the skills we have been working on all year long. Although I call it a “final,” it doesn’t count for any more than any other assignment. I use a standard based evaluation system in which students’ grades are based on their ability to demonstrate specific skills. I look at their most recent work in each skill area to determine their proficiency and to guide what we need to study together.

Recently, my department chair asked what we thought about moving finals before winter break. Many schools are doing this so kids do not have homework over the vacation. My response was that moving finals solves nothing. It gives the appearance that we are addressing issues of student stress and meaningful assessment, but we are in fact shuffling shells.

We need to change what we teach and how we teach it. We need to make assessment (and school) meaningful and relevant. Finals are an archaic and problematic practice. Simply stating that colleges do them and we must prepare our students is inadequate justification. If colleges are doing something that is not pedagogically sound, that doesn’t mean we should follow. High schools and colleges need to get out of the nineteenth century. The well-being of our children depends on it!  

Star Wars: Into Darkness

As I sat in the movie theater waiting for Star Wars: The Force Awakens to begin, I noticed all the children arriving. I was distressed when a family with two children under the age of three sat not far from me. Another child had some kind of light up toy and was spinning it so it cast a green light throughout the theater.

One of the ads before the movie started was selling Star Wars pet toys. The pets were complaining that they didn’t get to go to the movie with their owners. I have seen Star Wars branded products from toys to oranges. It made me wonder if I had paid to see a movie-length commercial. SPOILER ALERT: I am now going to discuss the film assuming you have either seen it or don’t mind reading about details of the plot.

The movie was fun. I enjoyed it. I was surprised to see a storm trooper who is unwilling to kill people. I wanted to know more about how that happened. I loved that the primary protagonist was a woman who doesn't need others to rescue her. I was delighted that no one commented on her appearance. The variety and diversity in the casting are important and appropriate. This film even passes the Bechdel-Wallace test!

The Force Awakens reminded me of the three original Star Wars movies more than the three prequels, but it had shades of those, too. In fact, it reminded me of the prior movies too much. We started on a sand planet with scavengers. We had an orphaned character who adopts a droid. A short wise alien gave advice. The force was used to escape. A man battled with his father. Planets were destroyed by a horrible weapon and then the weapon was destroyed. It felt like returning to an old home that had been updated and redecorated by new owners, but was still essentially the same place. Although the film received initial praise, more recent reviews have been more critical of its derivative nature.

As has been well documented, the plot didn’t make sense. I kept asking questions that the film didn’t answer. It was a good versus evil parable, but it didn’t say much more than evil is like the Nazis and good must fight evil. The real title should have been Star Wars 3 7: The Search for Luke. However, how and where we found him was also baffling.

I imagined a script meeting for the 2013 Star Trek film, Into Darkness, where J.J. Abrams says to the Star Trek screenwriters, “Just take your favorite moments from earlier episodes and films and rework them. That’s what I am doing with Star Wars.” The prior Star Trek picture, also helmed by J.J. Abrams had some of the same issues as this one: too much rehash and a plot that didn’t make sense. Into Darkness lacked all of The Force Awakens’ positive traits, and is a far less faithful shadow of the original.

And unfortunately, that is what these two recent revivals of old beloved “Star” series have in common: they are nostalgic copies. They are action-adventure rollercoaster rides that dazzle our eyes, leave our hearts pounding, our heads spinning, but take us nowhere except back where we started. They are products designed to sell toys, merchandise, DVDs, and movie tickets. They exploit our fondness for Stars past by copying the shell but neglecting the substance. The recent Star Wars picture does much to modernize the franchise and bring it into the twenty-first century. It even feels more like the original trilogy. But it should have been so much more.