It's been about a week since I finished my final exams for my Fall 2024 semester. Fuck finals. "They are the worst idea I have ever heard of!" said every student who has ever had to take a final. Those students are right!
For those of you who have never had a final, they are a simultaneous set of exams from all of your classes, which have content covering all the content you have learned that semester/trimester/quarter. They usually occur over the span of a few days or a week.
They are awful. In most cases, the final can make up a substantial portion of the final grade you receive, giving your class grade a huge swing at the very moment you can do nothing more to change it. For some, it is the single assignment that saves their GPA. For others, it sinks it into the floor. The massive weight placed on the final exam is absurd.
Why do schools do this? Who the fuck knows. It's supposed to "show your cumulative knowledge", except they know damn well that students will just cram the night before anyway, so it doesn't test cumulative knowledge at all.
To encourage people to space it out, my college adds "Reading Days", in which there are no classes or exams in the days just before finals, in order to encourage students to space out their studying. At that point, it's just spreading the cramming over a few days, and still not actually testing students on cumulative learning. Clearly, the school knows that final exams are stressful and hard, and that students need to study a substantial amount to prepare.
So why not abolish them?
Well that's preposterous and outrageous, how could such a thing ever be possible?Students must suffer the stress of finals, and the beatings will continue until grades improve.
Okay but really, I know it's possible because I lived it! At no point during my K-12 education did I ever take a final! Sure, some classes happened to have tests at the end of the semester, but they were on the topic at hand, not on everything we had been taught since the beginning of class! It was wonderful. For whatever reason, though, collages do love their finals.
This semester's finals were quite diverse in form, I will say.
I took 4 classes this year, and each had a final.
- COMP229 Data Structures
- COMP149 Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
- AN130 Introduction to Korean Society and Culture
- SPAN101 Spanish 1
COMP149 had the most traditional final, with a sit-down 2 hour exam, no calculators allowed.
One interesting aspect is that on the previous 2 midterms we were allowed to have 1 8.5x11 (~A4) cheat sheet (double sided handwritten). On the final we were allowed 3, with the intention being that we bring the 2 used previously and make a third for the remaining material not covered by the other 2 midterms. That, however, was not the letter of the law.
I crammed the contents of both cheat sheets onto one side of one page, and then used the remaining 5 sides to write down every single thing I could about the 3rd unit. I ended the course with an A.
ASN130 ended with a final essay and creative project, in which you proposed a film or documentary, and then wrote about academic discussions on the topic.
In mine, I proposed a film about a fictional North Korean who receives a balloon from South Korean activists, and realizes that they should defect. What the person does not know, however, is that there is a camera inside livestreaming it all to South Korean audiences, and it becomes something like the Truman Show. I then discussed the academic discussions about the effectiveness, legality, and political repercussions of the balloon launches.
To be honest, I sat down and wrote it with minimal editing, start-to-finish, and still managed to get a 98 on that one. I found it to be quite an interesting topic!
SPAN101 was a written and oral Spanish exam, I really have no notes on that class, though I got a B+ in it.
My favorite final by far though was the one I studied for the least, and my goodness was it the most fun test I've ever taken. It was for my COMP229 class. In that class, which is about the systems that computers use to store data, for the final we had a technical interview, with a whiteboard and everything! We were introduced to a new kind of data structure (union-find) we had never been taught in the class before, and we had to reason out on the whiteboard the way we would implement it. It was quite interesting, as it wasn't based on any particular unit, but more on the instincts developed in the class. There was no studying to do or cramming the night before. Instead, I scheduled a time to meet with the professor, and it went great. I passed the interview, showed true cumulative knowledge, and had a good time too, all without the studying or 2-hours of sitting and writing.
From my accounts above, you may think that I didn't have a difficult time during finals, and that I shouldn't be complaining about them since I received good grades. But I just know that if I had received bad grades on those finals, my complaints would fall on deaf ears too, since I "hadn't studied enough"... or whatever. Regardless, this is my blog and I will publish whatever I want.
I drank more coffee before these finals than at any time before. I stayed up for over 24 hours at a time, learning the definitions of hundreds of Spanish words, plus their conjugations and uses, or writing page after page of that essay, not to mention the 6 sides of cheat-sheets filled with 6-point handwritten font (don't @ me).
It's been only 2 weeks since finals and I promise you that I could not get nearly the same score on those SPAN101 or COMP149 exams. That's how I know I was cramming, rather than studying. COMP229, on the other hand, taught me real lessons that I could actually use in programming, and I loved that class. And as for that ASN130 final paper, I'm still pretty proud of it, despite the time-sink it was to research and then write.
Finals are terrible, and I hate them. I have seen the light on the other side, and implore collages like mine to restructure away from finals.