Harvard Ditching Final Exams? 371
itwbennett writes "According to Harvard magazine, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted at its meeting on May 11 to require instructors to officially inform the Registrar 'at the first week of the term' of the intention to end a course with a formal, seated exam, 'the assumption shall be that the instructor will not be giving a three-hour final examination.' Dean of undergraduate education Jay M. Harris 'told the faculty that of 1,137 undergraduate-level courses this spring term, 259 scheduled finals — the lowest number since 2002, when 200 fewer courses were offered. For the more than 500 graduate-level courses offered, just 14 had finals, he reported.'"
one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Informative)
Usually in classes of this sort, the grade is based on Project work and assignments that are completed.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't go to Hahvahd, but I have sometimes had professors count big final projects instead of a big final written exam.
Sometimes the class content just isn't amenable to written exams.
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I don't go to Hahvahd
I see that you have never been to Boston either. Only a relatively small percentage of Bostonians drop their Rs. And not many of those people can afford to go to Harvard.
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I've seen the documentary known as "The Departed".
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I see that you have never been to Boston either. Only a relatively small percentage of Bostonians drop their Rs. And not many of those people can afford to go to Harvard.
I guess KingAlanI isn't the only one to have outmoded ideas of Boston area institutions. [harvard.edu]
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There are always a class of families who make too much to qualify for financial aid but not enough to afford tuition + expenses. Not that that's necessarily such a bad thing, it's just the way it is.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not just college, it's true for life in America in general. The basic principle is that you pay for something because you want more of it. Also, tax breaks are just another type of subsidy. It seems that the government wants more unsuccessful black people, more broken families, more poverty, more women working outside of the home, and more artificially large businesses. I would have thought Harvard would be more accepting of white middle-class males than the rest of our society.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Funny)
It's a fucking nightmare, honest.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Informative)
That's less true at Harvard (and to a lesser extent MIT) than it has been in the past, if you're accepted they make a real effort to get you in at a cost you can afford and with minimal (or in Harvard's case, no) loans
From the page I linked:
I'm sure there are a handful of people who will have financial problems, but for the vast majority of students, the only impediment to attending Harvard is their academic performance.
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the only impediment to attending Harvard is their academic performance.
You were really getting my hopes up there, until that last sentence.
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Not true. Most colleges deny shitloads of fully qualified applicants because they simply don't have enough room. This isn't an accident, this is intentional. The more students that a school rejects, the better they are. A huge impediment to attending harvard is the fact that they need to be seen as "selective" in order for their diplomas to be given way more weight than they deserve.
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grading students on how much they get done, and never testing them on knowing why they did the things they got done in the way they did, or better yet how they should have got them done, is not higher education. it's tech school.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone know the percentage of Harvard students that graduate cum laude? Magna cum laude? Summa cum laude?
(Hint: 50% graduate with these "rare" honors.)
Anyone care to guess what the average GPA is for a Harvard grad?
Why oh why did I have to go to school somewhere they didn't inflate grades? Studying makes college so much more challenging than it needs to be, apparently.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Informative)
Universities, especially big-name ones like the Ivys, hate giving out low grades. So they don't. They get most of their money from tuition and alumni grants, and pumping the grades up keeps these two groups happy and paying out. This is particularly endemic at the graduate levels.
And, seriously, you need references? Is Google broken? 5 seconds:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2008/10/05/doesnt_anybody_get_a_c_anymore/ [boston.com]
In 1950, 15% of students at Harvard got a B+ or higher. In 2007, >50% were A or higher.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/2/13/c-minus-prof-to-give-more-as/ [thecrimson.com]
"I was very delighted that I would find out what he thinks of my true performance while not hurting my transcript,"
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I've done comp sci and physics, and 4-5 things in a class is about normal. I'm teaching a course this year that will be 4 assignments and a final. I'm not thrilled at having a final, but when the class is big enough that you don't really know the students the only way to know if a student actually did any of the work they claimed is to test them on it, in class. On the other hand I'm not going to ask 3D game engine code in class time. It's a tricky balance, since brilliant coders may not be any good at
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It depends a bit on the assignment, and I'm being somewhat glib. We have lots of ways we check for cheating, exams are part of that.
Generally, in courses where I'm the TA, I know if a student has cheated right away on an assignment. You know them, you know their level of competence, and if everything is inconsistent with that, you know something is fishy. But I don't have the money (ie people time) to police every line of code in every programming project. Even deleting the code and asking them to reprod
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:4, Interesting)
i mean if you can trust the professor without testing the student, why not trust the student directly? why make the student get out of their car?
Given that most students only show up to school to get a degree to fill a job requirement line item, and will neither use the knowledge they allegedly collected nor attempt to apply it, what's wrong with drive through degrees?
Most jobs out there really need vocational training, but in the US that's tantamount to telling your child to go be a ditch digger (even if Med school and Law school are really just post-graduate vocational training). Instead we send them to Universities and tell our friends which University our child attends, where they drink, fuck and dig themselves in to debt for 3-4 years. Then, with their BA or BS, they march forth into the working world, expecting to learn everything important on the job. Why not just simplify this into a "here is your degree, now don't stick gum under the desk" approach. To a large extent corporations not only are OK with this, but encourage more of it with ever increasing degree requirements!
It's true that GPA is often requested by employers, but students have demonstrated a willingness to lie, cheat and steal (for decades) to get the GPA they need, so really this final exam thing is a formality anyway. The professors are there to research, why waste more time on a broken process that accomplishes nothing?
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:4, Informative)
This is an interesting portion of your comment. I'm a lawyer, and while law school was less nuts&bolts than you might think, the law school experience was quite a bit different than college. When I look back on it, law school isn't exactly hard, it's just grueling, kind of like walking across Texas in the summer would be. College was a whole lot more fun because the volume of information required to get through was so much smaller. Another interesting thing about law school was the number of unhappy people who were used to sliding easily into A grades, endlessly whining about their C- grades at the end of the first semester.
Back on topic, I wonder what law school would have been like without finals. Nice profs would give a midterm and final. Most simply gave a final exam at the end of the semester. Talk about performance anxiety -- blow the one test and blow the class. On the other hand, you literally can blow a case with one forgotten question to a key witness (*) so being put on the spot like that was sort of primer for real life.
(*) It doesn't usually happen, but I cruised to an easy win once after a plaintiff rested (I didn't even have to present my case) because opposing counsel forgot to ask a doctor whether his opinion was expressed on a "more probable than not probable" certainty level. Had he asked just one more question, there would have been an issue for the jury to decide, but because he forgot, my motion to dismiss was granted and the jury sent home. Miss a key magic phrase and you lose. Now that's some serious testing.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you basing this on? Let's say you want to be a mechanical engineer. Let's say I design a part for a satellite that's being launched next year. How do you determine whether or not a design I give you will withstand the forces of a launch? What do I use to damp the high frequency vibrations that the optics package won't tolerate during launch?
These are very real problems that thousands of engineers are actually working on every day. This isn't some stupid thought problem that no one has to deal with. To solve the problem you need to know calculus, mechanics of materials, statics, physics, etc. Where do they teach this info on-the-job? Name a single company that teaches you how to design satellite parts without any knowledge beyond 12th grade and I'll eat my fucking hat.
People like you assume that every single degree is worthless. Your child, or yourself, got a degree in business, or art, or history, found that no one would pay you thousands of dollars to sit around on your ass critiquing other people's work and came to the nonsense conclusion that EVERY degree is worthless. I mean, your art degree doesn't let you do anything useful, how could an engineering degree be any different? You passed all of your classes by skipping lectures and showing up drunk or stoned to every test, how could an engineering degree be any more difficult to obtain? You fucked the teacher to pass a class, how could a real college be any different?
Seriously, you need to fucking think for a little bit before deciding that "EVERY DEGREE IS WORTHLESS AND COLLEGE IS AN ENTIRELY BROKEN SYSTEM". I don't think that college is flawless and I DO actually think that there's a huge push for everyone to obtain college degrees regardless of whether or not they need them. However, you cannot assume that because there's a small set of people that have worthless degrees that no one has a real one.
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What, you mean you don't want a doctor with no more than a high school education? ;)
Oh don't worry, we only let them learn on the job with the patients that are really old anyways.
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The entire point of board certification, bar exams, etc. are to demonstrate that you are qualified to practice a certain profession. Those that have published scores have built in extra credit!
Anything in universities is really inconsistent anyway, so the hell with it. If you want to fuck off for 4+ years, go nuts, good luck on your certifications.
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I've never met anyone who thought a college degree was qualification to do anything. My MS EE represented that I spent a lot of time studying electrical engineering, but I sure as hell wasn't qualified to design or manufacture chips or circuit boards.
The degree isn't worthless, I learned a lot of things that help me pick up real qualifications, and new technologies that help me stay relevant in the changing world...but it didn't qualify me for anything.
And that's really the point, I paid attention, I've use
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
i mean if you can trust the professor without testing the student, why not trust the student directly? why make the student get out of their car?
Well, I am a math professor (although at a much lowlier school than Harvard) and I've never had a great opinion of in-class testing. The simple fact is that in the short duration of an in-class test you can't give the students substantive problems to work on. Thus, in-class tests (or any other short-duration timed test) is really an exercise in "how quickly can you work lots of relatively shallow problems".
I far prefer to give my students lots and lots of really hard take-home problems. I call on them randomly in class to present their solutions at the board and explain their work. This is virtually cheat-proof... if you copy from someone, then it is obvious when I'm quizzing you at the board to prove your assertions. The only draw back of this method is that it takes a lot of effort on the professor's part, and it's only feasible on reasonably-sized classes. I can't do this when I'm teaching a 30-student class of freshman calculus.
My guess is that Harvard is the type of place where class size isn't an issue. When you've got really small classes (under 10 students) then you can really gauge the knowledge level of each student because you are engaging each one individually in every class meeting. That's the ideal learning environment, but it's expensive.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
"it's only feasible on reasonably-sized classes. I can't do this when I'm teaching a 30-student class of freshman calculus."
30 students is a lot? I guess it wouldn't work with 200 then..
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
"it's only feasible on reasonably-sized classes. I can't do this when I'm teaching a 30-student class of freshman calculus."
30 students is a lot? I guess it wouldn't work with 200 then..
What's the point in teaching a 200 person class? You can't interact with them at all, you can't actually grade their papers, and you can't judge the knowledge of a student in any meaningful way. Universities that run ridiculous classes like that are just stealing the students' money and wasting the professor's time. The professor might as well just video the lectures and put them on the web... which I think is what Khan is doing.
The whole fucking point of a professor is to INTERACT with the students.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:4, Informative)
There are teaching assistants and smaller "discussion" sections in which to interact and grade papers.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:4, Informative)
There are teaching assistants and smaller "discussion" sections in which to interact and grade papers.
Ah, I work at a lowly school. We don't have teaching assistants. The professors do all the teaching, all the discussing, and all of the grading.
Of course, in grad school I was one of those TAs leading discussion sections like you've just described. What I realized then was that most of the learning took place either in the discussion sessions or while the students were working on their homework. Really, those giant lectures could have been video presentations and it wouldn't have made any difference to the students.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Interesting)
Good luck with your PhD!
Of course, I was generalizing. Different people learn in different ways. What I have observed seems to apply to most, but certainly not all, students.
One of the reasons I don't bother taking attendance is because I know that there are some students who will learn perfectly well on their own. As long as they are doing well in the class, there is no reason to force them to show up.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Insightful)
I chose this comment to reply to as it was your most recent.
The stuff you've been posting through this thread about your methods, insights, and experiences is really, really interesting to a fledgling PhD student, and you've put a lot of effort into composing clear, well-phrased replies to a number of questions. I just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to put it into writing; people like you are what keep me coming back to this site, because by God there are honestly intelligent people out there willing to talk about interesting stuff.
Anyway. That's all I've got.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Interesting)
200 person classes are typically freshman, state-required (for state college board accreditation) weed-out classes. i.e. worthless classes that would otherwise require you to hire an extra six entry level professors ($400,000, plus benefits = about half a million dollars) to handle the teaching load. Assuming an average class size of 30.
If you're in a 200 person class for junior and senior level classes, you're either at a degree mill, you've pissed off your advior/dean, or both.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Informative)
otherwise require you to hire an extra six entry level professors ($400,000, plus benefits = about half a million dollars) to handle the teaching load. Assuming an average class size of 30.
Instead they hire 6 grad students at about $50,000 (stipend + tuition) a year with no benefits to teach the classes. I'm fine with this of course, since it's paying for my education. I'm a TA for two 30 student sections of a 200 student course. It's introductory engineering, and I find it very rewarding, since I'm one of their first real contacts at the university. I'm only a few years older than them, and I think they can relate to me better than the stodgey old professor in the giant lecture hall.
Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:4, Informative)
I teach two sections of 30 students. My hard commitment is 2 1 hr labs and 2 hrs of office hours per week. I should supposedly be spending 20 hours a week on TA duty, (teaching, preparing, grading, dealing with student questions) but supposedly in practice it's much less (I say supposedly because it's only the first week)
The math works out as follows: Tuition is $1000 per credit, and 9 credits is a full load, so tuition is $9,000 per semester. I get paid $2,500 per month with my stiped, including the summer, so that comes out to $48,000 a year.
I've found this practice of paying full tuition to be pretty standard among PhD programs in the sciences and engineering. Thing are usually different for Masters and Liberal Arts.
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Re:one step closer to drive thru degrees (Score:5, Funny)
Is there even such a thing as a 'classroom' that can properly accomadate 200 students, and not just be a professor in a fishtank talking to the wall?
Sounds more like a theatre, concert hall, place where attendees of a show might sleep while a suit gives a keynote, presidential address, or a church, than a classroom...
Professor: This is the gospel according to (book publisher)
Students: [eyes glazed over] Glory and praise to you oh Calculus
Professor: [canned speech]
Professor: The word of Leibnitz
Students: [barely awake] Thanks be to Math
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"The whole fucking point of a professor is to INTERACT with the students."
Not. That's what our current moronic spoon-feeding society thinks, wants and expects. The whole fucking point of a professor is to TEACH. Students are already quite good by themselves about INTERACTing... in campus parties.
You sound really bitter. Are you an un-tenured professor at a big research school who feels so much pressure to publish that you don't want to spend any time dealing with students? I know how you feel. I used to be you. I went to a better place, and now I'm much happier.
The point of the professor at my lowly school is to TEACH. Not to lecture, but to TEACH. How can you teach your students if you refuse to interact with them? I think you might be confusing "lecturing + testing" with "teaching." The t
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"if you copy from someone, then it is obvious when I'm quizzing you at the board to prove your assertions."
Not so, cause its much easier to see the solution and then figure out how it was derived, rather than doing the entire solution yourself
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Your system effectively dest
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lots and lots of really hard take-home problems.
Please, for your students sanity, small numbers of very hard problems is better than lots and lots of problems of any difficulty.
Actually, I completely agree with you. I was oversimplifying in my original post, partially for brevity, and partially because if I describe too much more about myself then I will loose what little anonymity is available here.
I assign a lot of hard problems, but I don't require my students to do all of them. I will usually have a small number of problems that I want everyone to do, then I'll let the students pick from the others. For example, I might have 10 hard problems on a weekly assignment. I'll in
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Chairman Claude Pepper (D FL) was investigating diploma mills. He wrote an essay and got his degree. He reported this as "I have achieved a lifelong dream. I am now Dr. Pepper."
It's ok... (Score:2, Funny)
It's OK, it's not like they were real exams...they were only McDonald's applications. 100% if you filled it out completely.
Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not ditch finals? The hurdle at these schools is getting in not getting through. Once you are in they pad your grades, and pass everyone anyway.
prove it (Score:2)
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Re:prove it (Score:5, Interesting)
"Harvard University is the poster campus for academic prestige - and for grade inflation, even though some of its top officials have warned about grade creep. About 15 percent of Harvard students got a B-plus or better in 1950, according to one study. In 2007, more than half of all Harvard grades were in the A range. Harvard declined to release more current data or officially comment for this article."
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2008/10/05/doesnt_anybody_get_a_c_anymore/ [boston.com]
"Plus, tough grading makes a student less likely to get into graduate school, which could make Harvard look bad in college rankings."
and also from that article this interesting bit:
"Fewer than 20% of all college students receive grades below a B-minus, according to a study released this week by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. That hardly seems justified at a time when a third of all college students arrive on campus so unprepared that they need to take at least one remedial course."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2002/02/08/edtwof2.htm [usatoday.com]
Or how about a student testimonial:
"The article reported a record 91% of Harvard University students were awarded honors during the spring graduation. Said one student, Trevor Cox, "I've coasted on far higher grades than I deserve. It's scandalous. You can get very good grades and earn honors, without ever producing quality work."
http://www.endgradeinflation.org/ [endgradeinflation.org]
Re:prove it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:prove it (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who tells you there's grade inflation at Harvard is lying.
Because you said so?
Harvard administrators said they are inflating grades.
Harvard professors said they are inflating grades.
Harvard students said their grades were inflated.
Various studies have demonstrated this to be true.
Besides, use some common sense: Harvard has been a highly sought after ivy league school for a few generations... are you really arguing that the class of 2007 are really that much more "fucking amazing" than the class of 1997? Yet the class of 2007 has a lot more A students than any class in the 90s.
There's not a single student at Harvard who got an A or an A- (they don't give out A+'s) who didn't deserve it. Granted, it's hard to get a C grade, but that's to be expected considering how fucking amazing these students are.
Many of our politicians - congressmen and senators are harvard alums; do they strike you as particularly erudite? Does 'fucking amazing' leap to your mind? Harvard grads trend towards success because they come often from successful families before they ever enrolled, and they often build invaluable social networks while enrolled. The education itself is certainly good quality but its nothing special, and the students aren't really all that 'fucking amazing' either.
Re:prove it (Score:5, Funny)
Not because I say so, because of the arguments I laid forth in my reply.
I wonder what percentage of administrators, professors and students at other universities also speak of grade inflation. Maybe less, maybe more, but I don't see why Harvard is getting singled out. You say "various studies have demonstrated this to be true." What studies?
I actually think the Harvard classes of late are getting even better. 20-30 years ago, they weren't nearly as competitive as they are now. Where is the proof that the class of 2007 has higher grades than the classes of 1990? What about *in comparison to other schools*? This is really the point that matters, not inflation over time. It's really the exchange rate that counts.
Finally, careful who you call a Harvard alum. I am speaking only about Harvard College, not HBS or the law school. And yes, most of our congressmen and senators are pretty fucking educated, actually.
Re:prove it (Score:4, Informative)
Not because I say so, because of the arguments I laid forth in my reply.
I wonder what percentage of administrators, professors and students at other universities also speak of grade inflation. Maybe less, maybe more, but I don't see why Harvard is getting singled out. You say "various studies have demonstrated this to be true." What studies?
Don't be intellectually lazy. If you just google the term, you might find the Wiki page [wikipedia.org] chock full of references -- for the ADHD crowd, here's a page with lots of easy-to-understand charts [gradeinflation.com]
The conclusion: Grade inflation is massive, even if you try to adjust for purported quality increases by using SAT results. It happened across all private schools (with the notable exception of Princeton, who put in some radical measures to curb it in 2004) as well as most public schools. Harvard is not exceptional.
What a shame (Score:5, Funny)
If only they had 200 more undergraduate-level courses.
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Haha, I thought it said 1337 already at first. :D
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Peter: Okay, guys. We're playing Texas Hold 'Em.
Ted Turner: Are aces high or low?
Peter: They go both ways.
Bill Gates: He said, "They go both ways."
[All laughing]
Ted Turner: Like a bisexual.
Michael Eisner: Thank you, Ted. That was the joke.
Fewer exams doesn't necessarily mean fewer finals. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fewer exams doesn't necessarily mean fewer fina (Score:5, Informative)
This is in general what happens. I was a math major there, and even a couple years ago very few math classes past the freshman level had sit-down final exams. Almost all of them, though, had take-home exams which were a much more thorough test of the students' abilities and took a lot longer than three hours (usually three days or so). I think this makes more sense and is a better measure of understanding. There are issues of cheating of course, but with a well-designed exam I think this problem can be minimized.
Re:Fewer exams doesn't necessarily mean fewer fina (Score:5, Informative)
Right, this is only formal, seated exams. My undergrad classes mostly had formal exams, but none of my grad classes did. They were all take-home exams (except for the experimental class, which had an informal oral exam). Most of them were the cruel 24-hour take-home exam.
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Re:Fewer exams doesn't necessarily mean fewer fina (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't professors generally assume that you took all the time available to you and didn't procrastinate?
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Does the three-hour final give bonus points to the guy who finished in an hour instead of three hours?
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Yes. They spend two hours reviewing their work and so find all the silly errors that those who barely finish in time miss.
Re:Fewer exams doesn't necessarily mean fewer fina (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who has experienced the working world, I can tell you that if you're employed by someone other than yourself there's often no bonus points for efficiency, either. If you get more work done, you get assigned more work or you may actually get some extra free time between projects. In your review after a certain amount of time, you may get a raise or a promotion based in part on your efficiency. Your work defect rate being low within the assigned deadlines is far more important than getting done well ahead of deadlines, though.
If you're self-employed for contract work, you may get the same benefits for being efficient as the rapid student. If your work passes muster and you can do it faster than some other guy, you get either more free time as free time or more time to spend doing another project. You're still usually under no pressure to do the job substantially faster from the client, although sometimes that does happen because the client failed to plan ahead or their other contractor fell through. That's when you can charge and expedite fee, though. What the client wants is a workable solution within their deadline. If you can deliver early and move on to another client, that's more money, but you might prefer a break between clients sometimes. (Actually, don't deliver too early or they'll think they've overpaid. If your estimate was too long by too big a margin, hold back on delivery a bit but still deliver somewhat early.) You still have to go out and find that next client, though, so the extra time doesn't always become extra money even if you want it that way.
If you're manufacturing something, the biggest concern in efficiency is in the process. Taking a given amount of time to improve the process is fine. The manufacturer, except in rare situations, would rather you work to deadline to get a bigger efficiency gain in the manufacturing process than to get a small gain in the process well ahead of deadline. If you can easily implement a partial upgrade early and still get a bigger gain at the end of the project without a lot of extra downtime for the two separate implementations, then that might be worthwhile. In no case is a large-scale process owner going to be happy with just a 2% gain designed in two days if they gave you a month of engineering time. They'll want you to spend the rest of the month coming up with further process improvements whether you can implement them separately or not.
The only real-world situation that comes to mind in which efficiency always brings a direct monetary reward is sales. The faster you can close sales and actually collect on them, the faster you can make money. Even then, some salespeople would rather get the same amount of money in less time (after a point, of course) than more money in the same amount of time.
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Yep, very few professions require fill-in-the-right-bubble skills outside of schools... so having them actually build or write out plans for how they would build something is a much better test.
Re:Fewer exams doesn't necessarily mean fewer fina (Score:2)
So that's maybe four out of around fifty subjects in the course of an engineering degree.
Has Harvard gone from the top to being one of the worst Universities or is US undergraduate education at the point where all we can expect from graduates is being able to cut and paste from wikipedia?
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I graduated from a good Engineering program in 1986, an
Missing out (Score:3, Funny)
Can't say it's good or bad, but these kids will miss out on the cathartic drunken debauchery on the weekend following the finals.
Kids these days... buncha pussies.
Other Finals (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Other Finals (Score:5, Funny)
and a few stranglers might show up only to find out there's no exam.
How very disappointing for the stranglers. I'm assuming they were hired to deal with the cheaters?
Final exams already ditched, registrar catches up (Score:5, Informative)
Registrars are like air traffic control at universities. They keep track of where a class is being held (and make sure they don't double-book a room), who's teaching it, who's attending, what grades the students got...
When I was in school, as soon as the registrar released their schedule for final exam blocks, I e-mailed the professor to ask if this rumor the registrar was spreading was true. Many wanted to hold their finals earlier than the stated date, with the exception of the math department which wanted the last finals slot and always got it.
To me, this was critical information, I wanted to be able to tell my school break job when I'd be back in town so they could plan my work. The earlier I knew when the finals were and weren't, the better.
So, really this is a registrar reacting to a change that has already happened. Final projects have replaced the final exam in many classes, so if a professor wants to hold a memory-based final they need to alert the registrar, as that office's default assumption is changing to if they don't ask for a finals slot, they don't need it.
Bring back the oral exam (Score:5, Interesting)
Have hands to tests as well and don't have fixed a (Score:2)
Have hands to tests as well and don't have fixed answers when more then 1 way can be the right answers and don't give a 0 for ones that get half of the answer right.
Have hands on to tests as well and don't have fixe (Score:2)
Have hands on to tests as well and don't have fixed answers when more then 1 way can be the right answers and don't give a 0 for ones that get half of the answer right.
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Best of all, it doesn't take 3 hours per student.
But even in a small class of 20, if it takes a half hour per student, that's 10 hours for the professor.
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Unfortunately recently US universities seem intent on admitting as many non-English speaking students as possible, so I'm not even sure you could use TAs to accurately asses students during oral exams.
Too true. I just started gradschool in computer engineering. They admitted 10 new students; I am the only American, while the rest are from China. We have some required first year courses together, and the before-class conversation is all in Chinese. What's worse, is they're starting to come to me for help with spelling and grammar. I'm happy to help them try to learn, but I have a feeling it's going to get out of hand when I get 9 requests to edit 9 different papers.
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Also judging from your comment, you obviously are an "English-speaking student". You may not be a native-English speaker, but you obviously profess some proficiency in the language. The grad students I was complaining about have almost no proficiency in the language, especially the spoken language. Trying to communicate with them in is an exercise in frustration.
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Or with a 10 minute oral assessment, it would only take 4 working days.
An oral assessment would grade presentation ability which is irrelevant to course content. Why make the rain-man do a presentation on differential integrals? He'd fail!
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An oral assessment would grade presentation ability which is irrelevant to course content.
But exceedingly relevant to life. Event academic research cannot exist without the ability to present (grant writing, paper writing, seminars, conferences).
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An oral assessment would grade presentation ability which is irrelevant to course content
I can understand your argument, if your /.-ID reflects your physical age.
As someone who went through a program with almost all oral exams, in a time when a 'power point' was still a socket in the wall, delivering 220V, 50Hz, usually, I can confirm that there was nothing about 'presentation skills' in our oral exams. It would be questions by the professors from the first minute onwards, and the students' task was just to
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Whats old is new again, they really should bring back the oral exam. Not only does it make for a great name for porn movies, it actually is probably the easiest way to accurately asses the students understanding of the material and prevents cheating(for the most part). Best of all, it doesn't take 3 hours per student.
Unless you videorecord them all (and I'm not sure how many examining professors would like to themselves be recorded as they mark every student every year), it's a bit harder to deal with appeals processes. And these days universities do have to have appeals processes.
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One of my favorite past professors said that he would like to, but he simply doesn't have the time even for a moderately-sized class.
His exams were atleast really intelligently assembled essay questions though, pressed somewhat for time.
Non-unique. (Score:2)
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Tests just test how good your memory is not (Score:2)
Tests just test how good your memory is. Not how to use that info in work place / real life.
Some certification tests are like that you can learn the test and have little to no idea on how to use that info in the work place.
Harvard can pick only the best students (Score:3, Insightful)
Harvard graduates something like 96% of its incoming students. MIT graduates something like 94%. The students entering institutions like that already know more than the graduates of lesser schools.
Whatever Harvard does will be just fine ... for Harvard. My school, where I have 100 students in a class and I get about 5 minutes to evaluate each student, will keep final exams because that's all we have time to do. OK, so I exaggerate a bit but it really does come down to economics. How much time do you have to work with and evaluate each student? If you don't have much time, you have to use exams.
Re:Harvard can pick only the best students (Score:5, Interesting)
No they don't. I live across the river from Harvard, where I regularly interact with students. Harvard is a good school with a great brand, nothing more, nothing less. If anything, the students at Harvard suffer from a very strong peer norming pressure, where they come to believe they deserve the ridiculous opportunities (without validation) that the Harvard brand affords them. The professional schools (law, business) are the worst in this respect; the graduate programs (ie, Arts & Sciences) are the most likely to produce a human being who produces in proportion to their consumption. I think it is a shame that the school is following the assumption "once you are accepted into Harvard, you are already successful by definition, and you no longer have to perform." Isn't the point of schooling to educate, not to certify? How can education work without performance feedback?
MIT is a different story. While there are clearly many opportunities and the MIT brand is also powerful, in general, the typical student at MIT is more interested in proving themselves rather than just taking advantage of the brand. Maybe my experience is limited, but by now, n > 100.
It just irks me that so many people perpetuate the myth that Harvard or MIT is some blessed land of the talented. Disclosure: my undergraduate degree was from a state university; my PhD was Ivy...I speak from experience.
Re:Harvard can pick only the best students (Score:4, Interesting)
Faddishness? (Score:3, Informative)
Coincidentally, I read a piece today comparing the core curricula [newcriterion.com] of Columbia vs. that of Harvard over the years. The gist of the piece was that while Harvard has had some interesting experimentation, they've also been prone to basing their course requirements on esoteric themes that no one outside of academia really sees the point in, and that Columbia, by contrast, has been much more committed to the classical means of teaching and curriculum. In short, the article posits that Columbia is more concerned with the acquisition of knowledge (and hopefully, some wisdom), while Harvard is much more into being a trendsetter and concentrating on the process of learning. Columbia: it's what you learn. Harvard: it's how you learn. Most people have this mental image of Harvard as being a place where you're enveloped in Plato, Milton, and Shakespeare, and apparently, unless you choose to be, that's not true anymore. There's really not a reading list that all students are required to master anymore. If you want to leave all that dusty stuff behind, hey, fine by the profs. Columbia requires all students to study the important books of the western cannon. So if you're looking for a classical Ivy League education, ironically Harvard may be the last place you should go.
Re:I agree - for bright students in Ivy-League (Score:5, Interesting)
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I suppose if they are brought up in a society where no one owns any ideas, blatantly copying entire works doesn't seem like a wrong thing to do.
Actually, being a GPL-FOSS-etc. person, I don't agree fully with you; nobody should own an idea. If only, because his/her idea is based on numerous ideas of others, who had all those ideas needed as basis.
Maybe we can agree on the term owe instead? If one uses an idea, any idea, a phrase, a drawing, that isn't one's very own, one owes it to the originator, to mentio