After railing against the Advanced Placement exams for the past month or so, the headline might come as a bit of surprise to my half dozen regular readers. I’m not talking about the AP exams nor the SATs, but good old fashioned midterms and final exams. This year my district decided to do away with our midterm exams and the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the subsequent cancellation of finals as well. Although finals haven’t been canceled for future years (yet), the district had been pushing teachers for the past several years to replace final exams with capstone projects that would take the place of finals.
Depending on who you talk to within the student and faculty population, these capstones are a complete joke or a phenomenal means of showing student mastery over key skills and content. When another teacher of the same course I teach implemented a capstone project, my students understandably were upset that they had to take a final exam. Two years ago I started a capstone project that was put in addition to the final. The students were not thrilled about it, but I think understood how the visual essay was a fine summation of the course material and skills. Last year my supervisor okayed the visual essay taking the place of the exam, putting the students on ostensibly an equal footing. I stand by the academic rigor of the project, but at the same time wonder how much content my students actually retain from the course.
That isn’t suggesting that taking an exam that they get no feedback on is all that useful. Brutal truth be told, teachers zip through the grading of open-ended questions on a final exam and students never see them. The exam is not something anyone learn from. However, the preparation for the exam can make a significant difference. For that reason I required my students to do review activities despite the fact that they wouldn’t be tested on them. Perhaps it would be a good idea to have large culminating exams that occur with time left in the school year to give teachers and students an opportunity to use them to advance learning, if only to provide some feedback so students can see where they need to improve.
In the next year or two we may see some changes in AP test scores for these students. Although there certainly would be other potential factors, if my worse fears are realized, the test scores will decline because our students will not have retained as much content as students of previous years. History courses are different than most other disciplines. Although students need a set of particular skills to be truly successful, they also need the basic content. You can’t really make connections between two historic events if you don’t know what the historic events are in the first place. Some critics of testing content conflate knowledge with rote memorization. While some memorization is actually quite beneficial, in an age where we can find accurate data with a few clicks, it is more than just names and dates that comprises content knowledge. It seems increasingly likely that without these culminating exams we are giving tacit permission to students to empty out their notebooks after each test and forget most of what they’ve learned.
Another reason why it is important for students to have the experience of preparing for and taking large tests is that so many liberal arts college courses still use a similar testing format. If we go whole hog on eliminating multi-unit tests, I fear we will be making the lives of our college-bound students more difficult.
Fenster on Education 