At a university, only the final exam should count. This way you can give honest feedback, and the student doesn't feel obligated to point out every little mistake to try to make you change your decision. It also allows them to misunderstand things at first, but then 'get' it later.

Of course universities don't like this, since they don't consider students mature enough that they do the homework if it doesn't "count".

If you take AC motors, and fail, and study your ass off and six months later can pass it with 100%, shouldn't that really be... your actual grade? Isn't a grade supposed to represent your ability and understanding of a topic?

And then almost magically: health problems, study problems, (most) test anxiety, and other problems no longer actually matter.

University education largely isn't about certifying that certain students know certain things. It's about showing that people who possess the degree meet a minimum IQ + trait conscientiousness cutoff, so that employers can preferentially hire those people.

Grades have several purposes in this framework. First is to drop low-employee-quality students so that the signal for the remainder is stronger. Second is to allow honors and GPA to provide multiple cutoff-levels to fine-tune the signaling. Third is to force re-taking of classes to extract more money out of folks who want to substitute it for IQ + effort.

As it stands, your proposed change would simply increase the amount of work that is allowed to be used as a bid for class position. That's not particularly helpful, IMO.

I guess you could sum it up as: the best test of whether a person is capable of creating something of value is to ask them to create something of value and see what happens.

Besides, taking a month to solve a single calculus problem that should take 15 minutes is a pretty good demonstration that you have not mastered the material.

Also, students are rampantly cheating by leaking previous tests. I saw it every day on campus. TA's leak tests to students and they're printed out before every exam (as the risk is too high to NOT look at a test in advance because your grades = your future in college). I've literally been in classes where everyone had last semesters final printed out... in the room before we took the current final. So the impetus is already currently on you, as a teacher, to have tests with permutations to prevent cheating.

Additionally--while I'm sure many teachers would object--tests shouldn't necessarily be written by the teacher. The teacher isn't teaching their own class, but a class meeting the departments requirements. So if students are being prepared (and not learning very specific permutations of general topics) they should be able to solve problems written by other teachers / test makers. So (on the bright side), teachers shouldn't actually be burdened at all by the testing. That could be someone else's job.

Now, of course, all of this has plenty of practical considerations that would need addressed. How do you permutate a QUALITATIVE question? And how do you easily grade highly permuted (per-person) tests? But just because there are unsolved issues, doesn't mean the underlying (god forgive me for saying using this term:) "paradigm shift" is unsound. It's just different and requires some new solutions to new issues.

But as programmers, we of all people, should be able to figure out how to further automate testing. But I think we really should decouple the idea of "testing" from "occurs at the end of class." I mean, why do we test all finals at the same time during the super-stressful "finals week"? Simply because it's practical. Except it was designed as "practical" before computers and automation were within the hands of every living person. Surely, students would test higher if they could study for a single class's test at a time and without worrying about it occurring during a family or health episode.

And what's a test for except hopefully proving that a student understands the material--but we all know thanks to "teaching to the test" culture that many students can cram for a test and then forget it within a month. But now I'm getting way off the original topic.

My thesis statement is simply: Re-testing finals is practical in modern environments and beneficial and incurs (almost) no additional flaws that the current setup doesn't also exhibit--like cheating.

There will always be cheaters. That's why companies, as part of the interview process, ask basic knowledge questions. It weeds out a lot of the cheaters and frauds. I hear people all the time desperately try to justify cheating. I don't care if people cheat, but I wouldn't hire any of them, and I doubt many employers would.

Sure, there'll always be bad tests and bad teachers. If one could be "taught to the test" then it's a bad test. It can certainly be true that one could pass the test and yet fail to understand the material, but I'm not convinced that people can master the material yet flunk the test.

But testing, in general, works. For me, I know that the pressure of final exams would motivate me to learn the material. No pressure, no learning.

40 years after I graduated, I'd surely flunk every final if I retook them cold today. I just finished taking the MIT 18.01 calculus class online. I was surprised at how easily the stuff came flooding back into my head. It's still there, I just had to chip the rust off :-)

I personally found doing problem sets and being able to check my answers immediately to be the best way to learn. There's no point to just copy the answers if homework is ungraded. If students feel no motivation to do homework to learn and practice, that's on them, especially at the college level.

If you don't grade exams but grade homework, then homework just becomes a take-home exam...

Students were free to do the homework or not, collaborate on it or not, as they saw fit. It was regarded as a learning tool that students could decide how best to make use of for themselves.

I thought it worked rather well, although the high stakes final exams were rather stressful :-)

(Attending lectures was also optional. Institute policy was that attendance would not be taken, and would not be a factor in the grade. You were free to attend lectures or not, do the homework or not, and if you got an A on the final, you got an A for the course. Some students could do that, such as the legendary Hal Finney, but I learned the hard way that I could not afford to miss any lectures and must diligently do and understand all the homework on time.)

Engineering relies on group projects and assignments a lot for your grade, because engineering isn't just about remembering some facts and writing them on paper. Then there's the problem that people have good days and bad days.

Different people are more capable in different areas of assessment, so I think that the most fair way to assess students is to give them a range of different types of assessment, so that even if they struggle with one type, they can pull through the other.

For instance, I always did really well at large assignments and tasks, especially group assignments (not because I rode on coattails, but because being in a group motivates you to do well), I was mediocre at exams, and I was terrible at small, individual assignments (<5% of final grade). You can see a direct correlation in my transcript between papers with lots of graded homework and small tasks, and poor grades. I did 200-level Algorithms the semester before I took 100-level Algorithms, and managed to get a better grade in the 200 level paper, because it had less homework assignments, despite being the second year version of the same paper.

Living in the dorms helped enormously with this, because I could usually find someone to help me with particular problems, and I sorely needed that help.

Anything less meant I was in deep doodoo on the exam :-) because that's the wrong time to try to figure out how to apply what was learned in lecture.

This was good enough to reliably get a B. To get an A, I had to work much harder and go beyond the homework.

If you really screwed it up, your evaluation wouldn't say anything bad, but it would be damned with faint praise and they could reduce your academic credits.

Overall it's a much higher resolution picture of a student's education. I transferred from a school with traditional grades and I prefer the narrative system. It really stressed out a lot of students who were too indoctrinated in the traditional game process of getting the right number of points for their target grade; some of them never quite figured out that they should just focus on actually learning the subject.

It's not perfect either, a bad performance on exam day might mean a bad grade even if you're good, but whatever, nobody cares about grades, anyway.

Do you honestly think students will not complain about the grade on a final exam and that the university will not continue to put pressure on students?

Not everyone performs the same way. Some students do badly under the pressure of testing, so having a variety of grades from a variety of types of assignments does help everyone do well.

They weren't super hard, if you turned up to the tutorials, you could usually get the tutor to basically hand hold you through it, and if you had any friends doing the same paper, you could just copy theirs. In fact, in first year, we had a rota for homework, so only one person would do it each week.

The problem with these so called "Higher" institutions is that the people fulfilling the actual function of the University don't actually get treated all that well. Everyone just walks all over them, including the people in charge. It has become a crazy lopsided system. These schools are basically becoming feel-good daycare centers for adult children of rich families

Edit: Thanks for the downvote but giving higher grades because it's more convenient than doing the right thing is... the wrong thing.

Painful that at some point it felt like your (and many others') best choice but it was still wrong flat out.

Hey maybe now you can "change the system from the inside!"

Note that grading hard is basically friction in the system that is fairly efficient to avoid.

The elite schools have plenty of smart and hard-working students who don't need hard grading as a motivator to do great work. Those students are the backbone of your school.

1. How does one define the "wrong thing"? Genuine question.

2. What about soft grading makes it a scam? Since letter grades are distinctly not criterion referenced, I struggle to see a strong justification for this claim. Please help me understand.

3. What makes you think that anyone in the system wants it changed? I humbly suggest that very few people actually do -- the current system is super-low friction and allows professors to work on the things that they are actually evaluated on.

It's surely a breach of ethics to evaluate someone's work and report that they did better than you concluded they did for convenience. I'd call that ethical breach "the wrong thing."

OP said to think twice about "honest grading" so I think dishonest grading is the problem with what you are calling "soft grading."

I don't think anyone inside wants it changed, I don't think anyone ever does when a broken system benefits them more than those outside. That's why it was in quotes.

Am I not allowed to call out obviously unethical behavior without offering myself as tribute to correct it?

If I call you out for littering do I have to clean the whole planet?

Sorry this feels bad man, I don't think you are a dirtbag but I think you did a bad thing. Done plenty myself, my crosses to bear, but always turned out better when called out for it.