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June 6, 2005
there's no week like finals week
For four years, finals weeks were a way of life. Every 9-10 weeks, I manned up and shoveled through a week of inevitable, overly stressful, and overly emphasized final exams. Then I took a year off from school, and I must say, it's really a treat not to have to deal with silly exams every two-and-a-half months. But alas, in what must be described in the "all good things to those who wait" category, I'm back in the finals saddle again.
Very few things stunt personal and academic development quite like finals week. I would be lying through my teeth if I said that I learn anything academic during finals week.
As an undergraduate, I would memorize and memorize for hours. A lot of really bad history teachers made me memorize all sorts of dates that I have since forgotten. The good teachers taught me the historical trends. Those don't have to be memorized -- they have to be understood. I'm still hanging on to those, and I'll be damned if I'm able to forget them.
When I first started grad school, I approached finals the same way I had approached them in the past. I wouldn't say that I knew more than I needed to for the tests that first quarter. But I would say that I over-studied. I was the master of random facts that lacked a general cohesion that's really necessary if anything's going to make any sense. I haven't studied like that since.
Throughout this one and only year of graduate school that I will take in my life, I have been learning the material as it's taught. So final exams are more of a review than a time by which I have to memorize the material. This is why I feel that my personal and academic growth are stunted for this week. I will not learn anything new academically. Nor will I grow personally. What I mean by this is that between now and Friday morning I will figure out roughly 50 different ways to avoid doing the work that needs to be done.
Make no mistake, as our beloved president would say, I will get it done. And I'll get it done well. But between the time I start and the time I get it done, anything goes. And very little of that anything will be academic. Talk to ya soon.
Posted by ben at June 6, 2005 10:32 AM
Comments
The very best final exams by the very best teachers (and as answered by the very best students) are interactive learning experiences in and of themselves.
That is, while the exam might assume (indeed, require) some basic competency in materials covered in the classroom during the term, those exams -- and the best answers to those exams -- take the subject matter to a higher level. A student must demonstrate mastery of the underlying information as the first step in providing the answer to the exam question, but to do really well, the best exam answers actually get the professor thinking. Professor Leopold was a master at giving these type of exams. They tend to be pretty open-ended; questions or statements to which the student is required to react; etc.
This is not true for all classes or subjects.
Sometimes, a "short answer" is a "short answer" and all a student can do is prove that he actually learned and retained the material by spitting it back. There is also variability depending on the subject matter -- calculus lends itself to a single correct answer. Even among my law school courses, there were stark differences. My ""Evidence" exam consisted of multiple choice questions (with room for an explanation, if desired). The Professor marked a student DOWN if his "explanation" revealed that he had answered correctly, but for the wrong reasons. I gave no "explanations"
and got an A+ in the class. Constitutional Law was a completely different animal.
My sense of your program is that those who teach it want to make sure that they are sending knowledgeable students out into the world -- because NU is the Gold Standard against which all learning disabilities practioners and programs are measured. So there is probably less room for my "exam as learning experience"
principle.
Good luck.
Posted by: Steve Harper at June 12, 2005 3:36 PM