Projects, not exams

One of my friends recently described this fortnight as one of the two worst times of the year.

Finals time.

Across IU, students are rushing through final papers and cramming for exams. We’re saying goodbye to friends, looking for summer jobs and trying to soak up a little bit of sun. Most of us are stressed out and not eating well as the pressure starts to get to us.

Some of it is our own fault — we knew these papers were coming, and we put them off until the last minute. But a lot of blame should be laid on the system. So much is piled on us that we stay up all night trying to get everything done, and after exams, we’ll just crash and need four months to recover until we come back and do it all again.

I’ve never been a fan of exams, and not just because I don’t enjoy taking them. I really think there are better ways to ensure that we’ve actually learned the material covered in class. What do exams really accomplish? They allow professors to give large, important grades. They cover a lot of material. They satisfy requirements laid down by individual departments and the University at large.

But what do they do? Do good exam scores give professors the satisfaction that we’ve learned the course material?

I don’t think so. In all my semesters at IU, I’ve never once had all of my classes give final exams. In fact, the more high-level courses I take, the less often I have exams. The professors recognize that having us spend 75 minutes writing every single scrap of information we can on any given topic doesn’t prove we actually learned the material. It proves that we crammed the information and memorized a few key dates and names to throw in.

More and more professors are turning to practical applications of knowledge (often in the form of papers or projects) to prove that we understand and can apply what we learned.

That isn’t feasible in every class. The 300-person lectures in low-level required lectures are going to have a harder time getting creative than a 20-person upper-level seminar.

A lot of times, it’s just easier to give a test and be done with it, especially in classes where the professor is aware that students are just enrolled to fulfill a requirement and they’re not actually going into that field.

But when professors are able to give a different sort of final assignment, they should. Many have found unique ways to test what their students have learned. A class on analyzing sixth-century art? Students write an analysis of an unknown piece of sixth-century art. A class on magazine creation? Students create and edit their own magazines. A class on cathedrals? Students design their own cathedrals.

It’s much more fulfilling to prove you can apply knowledge than to prove you can spit out numbers and dates in a timed, stressful environment. Papers and projects aren’t for everyone or for every class, but they are often a better way to discover what students have actually learned than to have them sit through an exam.

­— hanns@indiana.edu