A thread over on IMHO reminded me of something from college; pretty much every academic course had a final exam - except for what would probably be called English 101 & 102 (at Cal, introductory undergraduate courses intended for first and second-year students were numbered 1-99, so they were 1A & 1B), where most students would seek out the professors whose class descriptions included “no midterm and no final”, especially as most English finals were on Saturdays. The prevailing thought was, “English 1A & 1B are meant to teach you how to write, and that’s not something you can test properly in 3 hours or less.”
Is this a standard at other universities as well? Are there particular classes where it was expected that you would not have a final? (Besides athletics courses, that is; what would an “archery” final consist of?)
I had several classes as part of my undergrad that did not have final exams.
-A technical writing class where students were required to write a well-researched report. The report was the basis for the grade, the “final” was your final draft of the report.
-A class I took for my tutoring certification, the entire class grade was attendance and participation. There were no exams or tests of any kind.
-Some PE classes where attendance and “improvement” were the basis for grade.
All these classes were for credit and applied to my degrees. However, the writing class was notoriously difficult and hundreds of hours were spend on the creation of the report so students never signed up thinking they were getting a free ride due to the lack of a final test. The tutoring class was new and only utilized by current tutors looking for further certification.
I understand much of the coursework at the graduate level is basically pass / fail, where the courses are part of a foundation of preparation for a thesis or dissertation. I can’t speak to the accuracy of this as I’m still an undergrad myself.
I did that in grad school, but even at the undergraduate level took a semester-long class that was simply and only putting together a term paper: there were no tests in general and no final exam in particular; there was just, well, the senior thesis.
A few of my law school classes were “no exam.” But they were just as rigorous, as we had to orally debate points of law before a panel of judges, who did, in fact, judge.
When your grade is predicated on your research, standing up before a panel and arguing that research, and your decorum in the presentation, you almost wish for a written final.
When I was in grad school, it was taken for granted that Eng. 101-02 had no final exam. Upper-level seminar classes also had no finals, at both my undergrad and grad institutions.
At the university where I teach now, we’re required to build in some sort of finals-week event as part of the required contact hours for all courses, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be an exam. I usually do student presentations for both Eng. 102 (the “research paper” half of the freshman comp sequence) and any upper-level seminars I may be teaching.
At MIT, everybody has to take two semesters of calculus, minimum, even if you’re majoring in the Humanities (which you CAN do at MIT. It’s course 21). I don’t know if they still do it this way, but it used to be that you could walk into the math department at any time and take a test. There were six tests covering all the material from that semester. You could take them all at the beginning of the course, or all at the end, or space them out evenly throughout the semester – it didn’t matter. As long as you passed those six tests, you passed the course. No final exam needed.
Like a lot of people, I took the six tests for 18.01, first term Calculus, the very first week I was there, ands thus placed out of it. I took the six exams for 18.02 at pretty regular intervals during the term.
The only course I can think of with no final exam was a numerical methods class. We had the option of taking whatever grade we had going into the final and skipping the test, which I did.
I had a few without a final (pre 1980 Pitt). A couple had several smaller (almost weekly) tests and a couple (behavioral psych) had projects that ran the length of the class. But a midterm and final was the more common format.
We have an assigned midterm week and finals week, and we are required to have an in-class assessment during the assigned time, whether an exam or a final project presentation or an in-class project.
One semester I taught a course on web programming (using PHP) and had written a ten-page multiple choice exam. Thinking about it overnight I decided at the last minute to scratch that exam (I don’t think I could have passed it myself!) and gave an in-class discussion assessment instead.
Liberal arts college in the early 70’s. About half had final exams, but we did a lot of writing. I produced well over 100 pages most semesters. Really a better way to learn IMHO.
Being in the social sciences, a lot of my major courses had final projects or papers instead of an exam. The university assigned each class an exam slot based on the time they normally met; for courses without a sit-down test, the professor generally just told us that the block where our exam would normally be was the absolute final too-late-for-any-excuse-that-doesn’t-involve-an-ER-bill deadline for submitting your work.
I did have one class where the professor gave out the study guide for the first test on our first day, for the second test at our first test, for the third test at our second test, and at the third test told us that if we liked our grade to date that we didn’t have to bother showing up for a final. Attendance at his course was also completely optional, aside from the exams, through the entire semester. I think he was half hoping that one day everyone would spontaneously decide to ditch, and he’d get a three-hour lunch.
The farther into my undergrad degree I got, the less my instructors cared about whether I ever actually turned up to class. If I genuinely could complete whatever homework I had and pass the exams without sitting through lecture, they were perfectly happy to never see my face in their classroom. The only exceptions were my language classes. The Modern Languages department had a blanket attendance policy where you had to turn up to at least 80% of your class meetings or you automatically failed.
(I also had a lot of instructors blatantly ignore that. I pick up languages and accents so readily that on my third day of attempting to speak German ever in my entire life, someone asked me how long I’d lived in Germany. I think they thought flunking me for chronically oversleeping would have just been silly.)
Overall, the discrepancy between official exam and attendance policies and what actually happened was pretty large. Several courses had a “final exam” that consisted of a 10-minute questionnaire about our class experience, strictly because the department required all classes to give an exam, and the instructor either didn’t think it necessary or didn’t want to grade them.
Most of my English and Social Sciences courses did not have any exams. In fact, many just had a midterm “short” paper and a final “long” paper. I always thought it was risky to take a course where your grade depended on two subjective assessments. Actually, I can pretty much remember the topic for each of the papers in every course I took graded like that because I worked hard on them and I honesty had no clue whether they were any good until I got the grades back. (Then, again, as a Chemistry major I have no idea what I was doing writing a paper on the subject of Freudian views of sadism and masochism as applied to Bergman’s Persona.)
If final papers or projects don’t count for you as final exams, then I would say a majority of my undergrad classes did not have final exams. My math and science classes had final exams. My poly sci, journalism, English, Slavic studies, etc., classes all generally had papers or projects (although I could think of one English class that did have a proper final exam with essay writing in blue books.) I honestly can’t think of any final exams I took in junior or senior year.
Mostly papers or projects rather than final exams.
Most memorable: The prof came in and said we could either have an oral final or a written final. Our choice. Only we had to be unanimous in that choice. He led us in a straw vote. About half for the written and half for the oral. He said, “Okay, one more chance. If you aren’t unanimous it will be both. I will now leave the room for ten minutes.”
After about 30 seconds of vigorous debate I switched from “written” to “oral” and started convincing other people. My thought: This IS the final.
None of my autumn (Semester 1) modules have exams, full stop; students have two assessments such as an essay and a presentation, or an essay and a critical commentary.
I tend not to have exams in my Year 1, Semester modules, either. The Year 2 independent study module is assessed on a single extended essay (4000 words).
Semester 2 modules have an assessment and a final exam.
It pissed me off to no end in grad school that the lower-level grad classes had final exams; this was only because undergrads on particular scholarships were permitted to take certain grad-level classes, so the instructor had to give a final exam. We would have much preferred a substantial essay or other in-class or written work (there were a number of grad classes where the discussion was really dumbed down to accomodate these students as well, which was aggravating).
I took a course which was, essentially, “how to write somewhat nontrivial software in a small group”. There’s no real test for that once the last project has been turned in and demonstrated in front of the class and so on, so there was no final exam. There was a trivial final paper, but we were encouraged to work on that throughout the semester, so if MIT’s calculus testing schedule counts as “no final”, then so does this.
That class also had no tests beyond “is your group actually working together in a non-insane fashion”, because, again, what exactly could the professor test for? We were expected to already know how to program by that point, so group skills were the only thing being taught.
