How do you incorporate the results from a final exam into evidence of learning in a valid and justifiable way (i.e. grade determination)?

Question

How do you incorporate the results from a final exam into evidence of learning in a valid and justifiable way (i.e. grade determination)?

This question is open to all education levels.

What is your weighting and the justification for this weight? How do you incorporate past evidence of learning and the results from the final exam into the overall grade? If past assessments showed that a student was proficient, but the final exam showed otherwise, what would you do about the discrepancy? How do you assess a students' ability of working within a group of people on a final exam? (isn't this an important skill?)

Answer 1

I have always found this to be an extremely hard proposition in the US system of grading (hw + 2-3midterms + final=Grade).

All of the systems I've seen were imperfect, but some were better than others.

I find it is essential to correctly structure the final exam in the first instance. You want to make sure that the students performance on it actually in some way measures their mastery of the subject. This means making sure most things are covered and there is enough granularity to distinguish knowing almost nothing, knowing a decent amount and actually having mastered the material. This also means making sure that you cover most of the material, though we usually tend to be more focused on the latest material learned. This is supported both by the fact that the other material has been covered by midterms and the fact that the latest material tends to often presuppose knowledge of older material.

With regards to grading usually the Final will count more than the midterms but not overwhelmingly so. Something like 10% hw, 20% each midterm, 30% final.

There is always the question what to do if someone seems do well in general and then flunks the final. This might be due to a random occurrence and should be considered. Usually we would do our best to give people the benefit of the doubt and not let their grade suffer too terribly but there's only so much you can do.

The opposite situation where a person does bad on midterms and than great on the final is not great either since really you should care what they know at the end, but I tend to chalk that up to a lesson in consistency being important.

Altogether I'm a much bigger fan of oral exams that can be retaken multiple times as is the custom in many EU institutions. As a professor you can actually gauge the knowledge of the student instead of guessing, a fluke day doesn't ruin your chances and it's much easier to just tell the student to pack up and come back when they've actually learned something.

Answer 2

Assuming the comprehensive exam is well-constructed, it should be the most valid data there is, and therefore the easiest to justify weighting highly. As many ways as students have to game the system, I trust a good exam much more than I do homework to tell me what a student really knows.

When students do well on earlier tests or quizzes and then crash and burn on the final, that tells me one of two things. One possibility is that students were using short-term methods such as cramming to achieve the temporary illusion of mastery. The other is that they have previously seen only one unit's worth of material at a time, so they've never learned to select the right concept from an entire semester's material. Either way, their success on earlier tests does not indicate that they truly understand the material at the end of the course. Therefore, I see little to entitle them to a good grade.

That being said, I also believe that some traditional course structures inadvertently enable these weaknesses. That means that before we tell students that only what they know at the end truly matters, we need to do a better job of preparing them for that final comprehensive exam.

For what it's worth, the way I have chosen to address this is to make all of my tests contain a lot of material from earlier units. That means that students don't forget as much since they keep using old concepts, and they spend the entire course learning to select the right ideas from more than just the most recently learned concepts. It also means that the final is really just a slightly larger version of what they've been doing all along. That makes it much less likely that conscientious students will do poorly on the final just because they didn't know what to expect.

A few years ago, I abandoned the traditional approach of testing one unit at a time (with a comprehensive final) in favor of the approach I just described, and I've been very happy with the results. The final exam scores now match students' previous test scores pretty closely. Under the previous system, all but the best students' exam scores tended to lag the unit test scores by at least a letter grade. (If it matters to you, I teach high school calculus and pre-calculus.)