Jan 14 2009
WHY FINALS?
The end of the semester has come, and at the high school level, students are taking finals. As I watch my students stress out over finals (They are worth 20% of the semester grade.), I wonder why we give finals.
Let me put the equation to you as it stands where I teach and have taught. First, you teach the material and assess understanding with essays (I teach English / Language Arts), projects, and possibly a test. Then, you move on to unit two. Again, you teach the material and assess understanding. Finally, the semester ends and the district expects students to take a final for each and every course that they are taking.
The final, in one district where I taught, consisted of at least one question for each piece of literature covered in the course. Yes, that means if you covered twenty poems, there must be at least one question for each of those poems. In that district, everyone teaching the same course was expected to give the same final.
In the second district, each teacher was left to develop a final for the courses that they taught independent of the other teachers who taught the same course. Some teachers chose to compile all of the questions from all of the unit tests and call that a final; while others randomly selected numerous questions from prior tests. Either way, the students were just taking the same test a second time.
If teachers are going to be expected to give finals and students are going to be expected to take finals, the final exam should measure something more than can the student “regurgitate” the same answers to the multiple choice questions that have already been covered.
As a high school English / language arts teacher, I think some revisions need to be made in the way we look at assessing a students gained knowledge for the semester. If the above examples are how you address a final exam, I challenge you to try something different. Look at the skills you are teaching and use a new literary piece or excerpts from literary pieces and ask the students to analyze these pieces. In other words, expect the student use the skills that were presented with material that was not covered: teaching dynamic characters and reading a new short fiction piece to determine if the protagonist was dynamic, teaching meter in poetry and working to identify the meter in a new piece of poetry, or teaching subject / verb agreement and using different examples in the test. Right now, for most of us, the semester final is a “regurgitation” of the same answers to the same questions. Take the challenge! Expect your students to apply the skills you teach.
