<p>Trend watching article in the LA Times: in order to get an edge in college admissions an increasing number of high schools across the country are ditching final exams and turning to nontraditional “performance-based assessments” such as oral presentations or exhibitions to assess students’ academic achievements. This trend reflects the demands of a holistic college admissions process that takes into account more than just GPA, class rank and test scores.</p>
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…“I think what politicians are hearing right now is that tests are driving the curriculum and narrowing the way kids learn, so there is a lot of pushback from parents and teachers,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University who has studied assessment systems in dozens of states. “There’s more receptivity to the possibility of a different approach to assessment than there might have been five years ago.”…
<p>My kids high school used to have a policy that if you had an A in the three quarters preceding the last one, you could skip the final. It was a goal for many kids to get A’s and skip that final. About two years ago they changed that and not only made it mandatory for every student to take the final but added mid-terms in every class. They said it was due to surveys of the high achieving students that went on to college and were unprepared and didn’t know how to study for cumulative material tests.</p>
<p>That makes sense, but of course, they went overboard and now there are finals in Health and keyboarding… Also, to get some good raw data on how well the students are prepared they also mandated that the tests couldn’t be curved. Not bad if your teacher is the one that prepared the tests and you had been taught the material. But in order to standardize everything, they have one teacher creating the test for say, Algebra I and then all the students in Alg. I (MS too) take the same test. The other teachers of Alg I would have no input into the content of the test and in fact don’t see it until the morning of the final. Needless to say, they are still working out the kinks.</p>
<p>Every Algebra 1 student in our entire county takes the same final exam. </p>
<p>In our system, final exams exist but are of limited importance because they count for only 25% of the final semester grade. For a student who had the same letter grade in both marking periods of that semester, the final is almost meaningless. For example, a student with Bs both marking periods can get anywhere from an A to a D on the final and get a B for the course.</p>
<p>There has been talk about increasing the weight given to final exams, but this idea was rejected on the grounds that students might slack off on the regular classwork with the intent of bringing their grade up on the final – something that rarely works. I think this reflects a good understanding of high school students’ nature, but it does not prepare kids for college, where final exams are very high stakes indeed. One of the things that surprised my son when he got to college was the fact that he had to take final exams seriously instead of blowing them off as he did in high school.</p>
<p>We have final exams at our school and it counts 1/5 of your grade, It’s like having a 5th grading period. Each quarter and final weighted equally. It is a hard concept for Freshman to comprehend. But, the kids get it eventually.</p>
<p>My son’s hs has allowed exemptions from finals for seniors in all types of classes and for junior students in some AP classes if those students have an “A” average for the year in that course. However, all exemptions are being done away with next year (my son’s senior year) because of our district’s interpretation of No Child Left Behind requirements (I’m pretty sure, but not positive, that this is actually going to be a state-wide policy change). Needless to say, my son and his peers are not happy!</p>
<p>Our D’s school has the policy that if a senior has had an A all year (including midterm exam and 4th quarter which ends 2 days before finals), then they are exempt from the final. It is a huge motivator. This policy does not include classes which only meet for one semester.</p>
<p>Our school policy is that all students must take finals exams except for seniors.</p>
<p>Seniors are exempt from 1st semester exams by passing all of their classes and meeting or exceeding on the Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE).</p>
<p>Second semester seniors are exempt if they have less than 30 “discipline points” and have missed no more than 7.5 days of school. Also, of course, they must be passing all of their classes.</p>
<p>Seniors must take exams in college classes however regardless of being exempt from the others.</p>
<p>I think this is really cool, if they do it right. My school (private, very progressive Dewey-esque philosophy) didn’t have final exams. At all. In fact, I never had ANY exams in my English classes, just portfolios. Parents and students alike would always worry that we wouldn’t be prepared for taking finals in college, but most people make the adjustment pretty well. I had no problems (of course, being a humanties student, most of my finals were final papers anyway, very reminiscent of final portfolios)</p>
<p>My high school never had final exams. Once a new principal tried to have them, but the teachers revolted en-mass, giving extra-credit finals and stuff like that.</p>
<p>Our high school has finals for all underclassmen. There are no finals in the visual and performing arts classes, or in PE. Some teachers have gotten around this requirement by assigning projects or papers, and making the final itself extremely easy. Mid-terms (taken by all students, including seniors) and finals account for 1/5 of the final grade.</p>
<p>Seniors don’t have to take finals at all. They get out a month earlier than underclassmen, and there are many mixed classes (juniors & seniors); teachers would have to write two different finals.</p>
<p>My high school’s final exams were abolished over five years ago, leaving just one session of mid-year exams. This was done for many reasons, one of which was pressure by teachers who said that they could give final exams if they felt like it, or papers, or presentations, or nothing special. Teachers did not like the idea of a week (or whatever) taken from the teaching curriculum for exams.</p>
<p>My high school had two days of final exams each quarter. Every class was required to give an “assessment of some sort”, though some did presentations or something instead of finals. I think they were supposed to make it count for at least 15% of your grade.</p>
<p>Omitting final exams is not always a good thing.</p>
<p>My daughter’s school recently implemented a policy that says that students who take an AP test are exempt from the second-semester final exam in that course. Many students welcomed this, but others were outraged. The reason: if there is no final in a course, then students are graded according to the “trend,” meaning that those who get a B in the first marking period of the semester and an A in the second get an A for the course, while those who get an A in the first marking period of the semester and a B in the second get a B for the course. Kids who had gone A,B in a course wanted the option of taking the final so that they could try for an A in the course, and the school agreed to do this. So now the teachers have to make up final exams for AP courses, but only a small number of students take them.</p>
<p>Shaping the HS curriculum around the college admissions process is no better, and in some ways worse, than shaping the curriculum around final exams.</p>
<p>I am not sure that high schools that do away with final exams are doing their students any favors. Most college classes have very heavily weighted cumulative exams (sometimes as much as 70% of the class grade) and most students need practice in studying for this type of exam before they get to college.</p>
<p>Everybody at my S’s high sch. takes mid-year exams and final exams for every class even PE. The final exams in June count for 25% of the entire course grade. So that one exam can make you or break you. Final average for each quarter (semester class) count 37.5% and then the exam grades makes up the rest. </p>
<p>I hate the thing where one teacher makes up the exam for the entire dept. S had a “B” all semester in his math class which was taught by a foreign teacher on exchange to our sch. S admitted that they did very little work in the class and spent most of their time listening to the teacher explain her country’s culture. Another teacher (who really taught the subject) made the exam. Everyone is S’s class failed so S ended up with a C for the class because the exam counted 25%.</p>
<p>AP classes do not have a final after the AP exam. The final AP grade is just an average of all the quarter grades. The school system pays for all AP exams. If a student enrolled in the class does not take the AP exam, their final grade is dropped by one letter grade.</p>
<p>The private school that I attended has end of semester exams for grades 7-12. Everyone has to take the fall semester exam, but you can get exempt from spring exams if you get an A for the year.</p>
<p>IMO, this policy is the most balanced; everyone has to practice taking a cumulative exam, but it also rewards and motivates students to keep up their grades so that they can get that extra week off at the end of the year.</p>
<p>My D’s school uses this system: 1st 9 weeks some disciplines have projects, the rest have 9 week exams. Next 9 weeks, they reverse so that the opposite disciplines now have the projects and the exams. This is a royal pain in the butt; in many cases the projects have little to no benefit for the actual material that’s being covered in the class. It turns into phenomenal busy work. We’re being told this is being done because some students don’t test well on exams … so this evens the playing field, so to speak. Now we have parents helping their students complete projects, and my D has kids in her honors Algebra II class going, “whoa! I might actually get an A or a B this time because of the project.” At the time she was studying for her AP World History exam this May, she was also doing a World History project. Geesh!</p>
<p>I wish d hs is like that, the AP classes are exams intensive and they are not grade on curves either, unlike college courses, teachers go stricly by scale A=94+, B=84+, C=74+ and D is less than that. They also use the same text books that Harvard and UCLA use for some of their AP classes.</p>