With finals week in full swing for KSC students and pressure mounting to finish out the semester strong, how do faculty and staff feel about the concluding week of the semester and different forms of student evaluation?
Adam Keese, who serves as an advisor to TRIO, a federal program designed to aid students from disadvantaged backgrounds, said what often works best for students is variability. “The view students give me is they like a balance of both, so they like to see some projects and some exams, and a lot of it depends on the appropriateness for the course,” Keese said.
Keese said the use of final projects can be more beneficial to retaining course content. “There’s a lot of students that have test anxiety or other things where having a project to work on is more longer-term and it’s easier for them in terms of completing that versus trying to study, cram and memorize a bunch of stuff then take the exam,” he explained. “Projects are important because they help to synthesize all the different ideas that students are learning, so rather than just memorizing it for an exam and sort of putting it back out, they’re able to take the knowledge that they’re learning from their courses and create something with it,” he said.
Another hallmark of a semester’s conclusion is students cramming to redo and submit assignments to bring their grades up. An ‘academic comeback,’ the process of bringing one’s grades up just in time for finals, is a phrase that has gained popularity on social media in recent years.
Keese said there are a few reasons why students get behind on their work. “In some ways, [stress] can’t be avoided. Some courses just have a huge amount of work and students are taking a bunch of other classes and it’s just hard to avoid. For some students, they’re procrastinating too much, they could use work with their executive function and time management skills,” he said.
Keese noted the resources students have to prevent an eleventh-hour grade fix. “Aspire, for example, we meet with students on a regular basis to work with students to try and schedule out their work and be more intentional with how they plan assignments and chunking out things … versus trying to go back and make-up all that work at the end,” he said.
Tanya Sturtz, who serves as associate dean of accreditation, compliance and assessment and director of educator preparation and teaches classes in the education programs, said the landscape of learning has changed over time. “It’s based off of research, it’s based off of learning how people’s minds work or how they demonstrate the learning. We used to have classrooms that only had seats lined up in a row because back in the early 19th century, it was to prepare children to go out and work in the factories,” Sturtz said. “Having just one type of exam does not allow the multiple ways that people engage in learning to demonstrate what they’ve learned but I think it really is discipline-based on what they feel is the best way to evaluate those learning outcomes,” she explained.
Sturtz said it is best to understand the ways in which students express their knowledge with assessments. “Some students, when they come to a test, they’re not able to demonstrate what they know but if you sat down and you said, ‘Let’s do an oral exam and you explain it to me,’ they can tell you in detail and you would just be amazed with what they have learned through the semester,” she explained.
Jim Kraly, who serves as associate dean of academic program innovation and teaches chemistry, said faculty having flexibility in terms of how they do finals is a positive. “It’s nice to think about a student who’s, instead of balancing four in-class paper-based exams, maybe has a writing piece, a project piece, a presentation in front of an audience or maybe something as conventional as a written response or multiple choice,” Kraly said.
Kraly recounted his experience as a student during finals week. “It’s a long week. I remember being really exhausted as an undergraduate student trying to get through those finals weeks, especially in the fall as you approach the holidays,” he said. “I remember in particular driving home one fall semester and needing to pull over just because I was physically spent after getting through those exams,” Kraly said. Additionally, Kraly underscored the importance of having Reading Day, a day set aside during finals week for students where no classes are held, to study and work on projects.
In terms of advice for students, Sturtz said concentrated studying and chunking out work can be beneficial and that students should leave time for themselves. “Making sure you build in time to have a little bit of social time like dinner with friends or going for a walk down Main Street with some people, because those pieces, the way that the learning works is it allows the information to settle in to that long-term memory in a way that it will be easier for you to activate it when it comes time to do the work,” she said.
Nathan Hope can be contacted at
nhope@kscequinox.com
