The true answer is: No grades should matter except the final exam and you should be able to take the final exam as many times as you want. (With a reasonable minimum period between retakes, possibly increasing each time.)

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.

>Isn't a grade supposed to represent your ability and understanding of a topic?

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.

A grade is supposed to represent your ability and understanding of a topic, but that's only half the equation. Are exams an adequate proxy for ability and understanding of a topic? They aren't for me. When I want to understand something, I create something which requires and demonstrates that understanding - this could be a Wikipedia article, a piece of software, or a lecture. Nothing of value is demonstrated by sitting down for a few hours under extreme pressure and regurgitating my "understanding".

I've never understood how someone could master a topic yet could not answer questions about it. I know from my own personal experience that when I bombed an exam, it's because I simply did not understand the material. When I did well on an exam, I had corresponding confidence that I understood it.

It is the difference between knowing "given a task in this knowledge area, I can accomplish it" and uselessly loading up on all that information to perform in a purely artificial situation the likes of which is never seen again.

So, good preparation for how interviews work, then?

Conversely, I was able to pass (with As) some physics exams without really understanding. That became painfully obvious in my solid-state physics lab class.

Memorizing a bunch of facts doesn’t demonstrate understanding of a topic.

That's a good point. Sometimes you need large, ambitious projects to both learn and demonstrate that learning. People learn to code well by working on big programs, and learn to write well by writing in depth on some subject.

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.

Taking the exam as many times as you want is a bit unfair to the professor, who has to concoct a new exam each time. If it is the same exam taken multiple times, then it is what is known as an "infinite time" exam which has a deleterious effect on students, as they will be more or less forced to spend infinite time on them.

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.

How about periodic testing, once every 6 months? Let previous classes retake a final. That's basically the same test load as before. (Another variation could be only giving partial credit. But it's going to be fairly clear who is trying to succeed and who is trying to game the system. Hence my suggestion of increasing lengths between subsequent testing.)

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.

Professors do need to permute the tests so that people won't just look up last year's final. But permuting them once a year is a very different proposition than permuting them an endless number of times as students demand to retake the test.

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 :-)

That's a strong counterargument. But I strongly believe homework shouldn't be graded. Incentives are completely misaligned; you're penalized for getting things wrong, when that's a natural result during the learning process. No surprise, then, when cheating becomes a major problem.

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.

Except when it comes to writing programs, the homework is the only thing that even remotely demonstrates your utility to an employer. I would go as far as to say that exams should not count, only homework should.

What? What employer has ever looked at a potential hire's homework?

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

I'm teaching an intro Web Development course at the University level right now. No exams, only projects and homework. All submissions in github, so it's likely some will be looked at!

I didn't suggest that an employer looked at homework. But now that you mention it, I have personally done that when it was made available on github.

Why, preparing for an interview.