Why punish them beyond a zero on the final and whatever mathematical result that causes their final grade to be? Is grading finals some sort of delightful treat the professor is disappointed to miss? If so, the test should have been worth more.
If all the students have near 100%, the professor probably isn’t teaching them anything anyway and truly is grading them solely for having pulses. Failing them out of spite should be the final nail in the prof’s employment coffin.
I’ve taken classes where the final was optional. The teacher dropped your worst exam score before calculating the average. It didn’t matter which test was the lowest grade. This policy was in the syllabus.
Hard to imagine an A student deliberately skipping the final exam and dropping to a C. If I was the teacher it wouldn’t bother me. I’d average that zere in with their other scores.
In some classes, yes–I teach in some programs that meet educational requirements for certification or licensure, so by graduating a student, we are attesting that they meet competencies set by our professional accreditation standards. If the final (or some other assignment) is where mastery of that competency is demonstrated, then it needs to be stated in the syllabus as a criterion requirement.
Yeah, I’ve had teachers tell me not to bother showing up for the final. I had one with a really convoluted grading schedule that none of us really understood how to calculate. Before the final, I went up to her to ask where I stood, and she just flapped a hand at me and told me to enjoy a day off. To this day, I’m not sure that even she understood her grade book.
Really, to me, finals are assessments. They’re a tool that a teacher can use to assess their student’s mastery of the material. If the student has demonstrated in other ways - assignments, projects, call participation, idle conversation before class - that they have mastered the material, what’s the real purpose of the final? It’s not assessment, it’s hoop jumping. I hate hoop jumping.
But what if it’s a clown college and the course is literally hoop-jumping?
I understand the attitude that some assignments are so important that their omission should make the grade an automatic failure. But if such an assignment really is that important, then the proper way to express that is to make it a large percentage of the grade. If your essential research paper or whatever is worth only 25%, then a student who does it but does only a piss-poor job on it (say, a score of 20% on the paper) could still get a B overall in the class. If it’s so important that a student who skips it should fail, then it’s also important enough that a student who bombs it should get a bad grade.
If that’s the question in the OP, then the OP needs to clarify. The hypothetical doesn’t show that. In the OP’s hypothetical, the class is already in session, the semester is almost over and the syllabus is already handed out, without the stipulation of the policy that not taking the exam would result in a failing grade.
If the professor in the hypothetical wants to add the requirement the following semester, that’s his call. But punishing students for following the rules he put out for that semester isn’t right.
If there’s some “hidden” issue in the OP, the OP needs to unhide it. The hidden question, given your assumptions, is pretty easily answered.
On preview: beaten to the answer by susan, but I’m posting this since I already wrote it.
The problem here is that this distribution may not be possible with a normal scheme where each assignment contributes a non-overlapping portion of the class grade. I’ve had courses where there were 5 assignments worth 20%, so getting a 0 on any one would give a B if you got 100% on every other one, or a solid C if you were reasonably competent at the others.
We can argue about whether a “solid C” counts as a “good grade”, but one class that did that also said if you failed to turn in any one assignment, you’d automatically fail the course, regardless of your other grade. It’s impossible to do this with a strict percentage model.
I also had a course recently where homework wasn’t graded, but failure to make a “reasonable effort” on at least 80% of the questions knocked you down a full letter grade. This was so more weight could be given to the term projects and tests.
A few people in this thread have made similar observations, which i find astounding.
I’ve had students that i knew were going to get an A, because they were good students, but they still needed to actually do the work. If the final exam is worth 20%, then missing the final means that the absolute best you can do in the class is 80%. In what world is 80/100 an A?
One of our prime responsibilities, IMO, is to be equitable in our grading among all of our students. If one student has received an A for every piece of work submitted so far, then i will probably expect that student to also do well on the final exam. But it would be unfair to the other students to simply allow that student to miss the exam altogether.
I’m also someone who doesn’t do “extra credit.” Extra credit is bullshit, and it is also, in my opinion, unfair to students. I agree wholeheartedly with the observations made by this professor. He’s a scientist, and i’m in the humanities, but as far as i’m concerned the same principle applies in both areas of study.
This has never come up. If it happened once, I wouldn’t care.
But if it did become a trend, I probably would create a syllabus that requires people to sit the exam. When I’ve taught, I developed my assessments not as a stand alone test, but a part of the learning process. Applying knowledge is a key step to cementing it in your mind, and often that happens during the assessment. Assessments also require preparation, and I consider that preparation to be an important part of the course.
When I taught English as a Foreign Language for example, I couldn’t force my students to sit at home practice speaking. But if I assigned them an oral presentation, they would have to spend time at home practicing. The actual presentation was less important than going through all of the work it takes to put it together. And good grade or not, everyone benefits from that kind of practice and they’d miss an important part of the learning if they just skipped it
I agree with you. If that’s the only scenario the OP is asking about, though, then the real question being asked here isn’t “Should you punish a student who decides to skip a final exam?” The real question being asked is, “Should professors make their course requirements clear in the course syllabus, and then stick to the syllabus?”
My own syllabi have a disclaimer about the nature of the course outline. I say that I reserve the right to make changes to the syllabus in order to improve the class, but that any changes will NOT increase student workload, will NOT reduce any student’s grade for work already completed, and WILL always be made with plenty of notice for students. I very rarely make any changes at all during the semester, and when i do it’s usually a small and student-friendly change, like extending the deadline on a paper for the whole class. No-one ever complains about that sort of thing.
I don’t see why a teacher would care if you didn’t take a test. Just mark the test grade as an F and figure out the final grade as you told the class you would. Student’s happy and accepting, so why does it matter?
I got really lucky on one of my finals. I had, if I had to guess/remember, and A or B going into the final. Ended with a C for the grade in the class. Then I remembered the final. It was a 10 page essay, I plagiarized the whole damn thing. I wasn’t thrilled with the teacher, the final had nothing to do with the class and we weren’t given the resources to do the final. That is, what we were taught didn’t prepare us to write this final. I think the only words of mine that appears in it were the transitions from one thing I grabbed from the internet to another. When I realized that that was probably the case (that I got busted) I went from being pissed that my grade fell so far to being thrilled that that’s all that happened. He probably just gave me an F on the final and left it at that. Even if he didn’t pick up that it was all stolen, I’m sure it was terribly written and mostly incoherent.
Just FTR, it’s not like it was a lit class (not that that made it okay). It was a music appreciation class. We spent the semester listening to classical music, operas, delta and chicago blues and just sort of talking about and discussing them and then at the end he says “for the final you need to write a 10 page review of an album that I’ll randomly select for each of you”. I got The Jimi Hendrix Experience. I was more than familiar with it, but never a big fan of Jimi, but like I said, we spent 6 months discussing 100 year old music, we were never taught how to ‘review’ an album and we never discussed classic rock. Based on the course, this was way out of my league, I didn’t even know what to write so I copied/reworded reviews I found on the internet.
My job isn’t to make my students happy and accepting. If that’s what they want, they should see a masseuse or something. My job is to teach the students the material.
Education isn’t a letter or a formula or a system to be gamed, and students who take that attitude are a detriment to their institution.
Then I won’t have to show up for the final, because I’m flunking anyway. 
You keep saying, “the work.” But for the classes I’m speaking of the finals have been assessments to help the teacher document whether we did or did not know our ass from a hole in the ground, not new work.
I’ve never had an English teacher tell me I don’t need to show up to turn in my Final paper. That would be work that needs to be done, same as the other papers. But I had, best I can recall, Biology, Anatomy/Physiology, Pediatrics, OB and Psych (all prereqs or in nursing school) teachers who knew I knew what I knew, and there was no realistic way that a score I would get would bring down my grade by a whole letter grade. Since the school doesn’t care about percentages, only letter grades, I was excused from those exams. (So were other high performing students; I was not a special snowflake.)
Sure, a 0 would have brought me to a B, but I wasn’t going to get a 0 if I took it, they knew that. If I had gotten even only an 80%, it wouldn’t have budged me from an A. All they had to enter was a grade for the course, so there was no problem on the bookkeeping end.
They tested us to death, constantly. The difference of one test here or there was not significant.
They skip the exam, they get a zero and the grades fall where they do. I don’t have a rule that they must complete all assignments. If someone chooses to blow off an assignment (not for a reason I can accommodate like a medical issue etc), they get a zero and we move on.
Quite a lot of it. U Toronto, for example.
Wouldn’t the answer to that question be an easy yes? The alternative is that the professor should be unclear in their course requirements and/or be random in sticking to the syllabus. Those alternatives are less preferable for anyone, I’d think.
I understand what you’re saying though. The question might even have been about how much flexibility a professor should have to change their syllabus in ways that could adversely affect a student. But if that’s the question, the hypothetical could have been created to show that more clearly. We’re now actually discussing a different hypothetical. Don’t fight the hypothetical. 
A more interesting hypothetical for the OP* might have been that the professor announced to the class on the last day of class that the professor was changing the syllabus to require the final be taken to pass the class. By that time, the professor knew that several students had nonrefundable plane tickets out of the area before the final would take place. Would that have been fair to the students?
ETA: *more interesting meaning leaving more gray area. It might not have been interesting to the OP author since that’s not the situation the OP is faced with or some other reason the OP decided to post that hypothetical.
Exactly how I feel.
I am assuming that skipping the final would be treated the same as if that person had shown up for the final and gotten a zero on it - nothing like, for example, “20 points out of 100 for just showing up”.
Yes. As a professor it’s my job to set the stage for their learning. To guide and facilitate it. To asses, provide meaningful feedback and evaluate it. But I can’t force it and I don’t want to try.