No More Final Exams at Harvard?

"According to Harvard Magazine, final exams are "going the way of the dodo."
Last spring, a mere 23 percent of the school's 1,137 undergraduate courses gave exams, the magazine reports. And a new faculty vote dictates that a professor must actively decide whether or not to give a final within the first week of class -- historically, it had always been a given that a class would have a test at the end of its run.

The impetus behind exam extinction? Among other factors, professors questioned their value as assessment tools and disliked the responsibility of proctoring them.

The Harvard Crimson reported in April that professors are increasingly being prompted to consider creative final exam alternatives under the school's new curriculum, adopted in 2009."

via the Huffington Post


Nothing new, it's already happening in universities and colleges across the nation. At Spelman, several professors assign final projects, papers, or take home tests lieu of the traditional final exam. I guess I'm all for it as long as the final assignment is not a group project.