Why cumulative, note-free final exams suck.

Depending on the reader, I may really be preaching to the choir on this one, but here I go anyway...

Finals, the ever-important test of tests that kids as young as young as middle school age are forced to take. I, however, don't want to talk about middle school finals, or high school finals, lets talk about college finals. What is a final supposed to do? It's there to test the students knowledge of the material of course, but in some final exams, that really doesn't happen.

Certain teachers (and everybody has had one of them at some point in their learning career) feel that the best way to test is to make it a fully cumulative final exam, with no notes. If anyone actually reads this, they may be thinking that I am simply complaining because I have one of these types of exams myself. They would be wrong, though.

It is indeed finals week at Indiana University, but luckily for me, none of my finals were like that. The fact is, if you tell students they need to have a an equal knowledge of what they learned in day one and what they learned last week, students will simply cram, and not learn. Yes, students should understand the material every day, but the best way to test that is by having questions that test comprehension of the courses main ideas. The best students are not the ones who can memorize the material the best- as is tested in many overly-large and note-less final exams- they are the students who can understand the concepts behind the material. 2+2=4 means nothing, if you can't break down and understand each of its components.

So, to all those out there in the world of academia: stop trying to shove your finals full of worthless questions! If you want to test all the material, give your students some notes for crying out loud. The real world does not demand of us an encyclopedic knowledge of introductory psychology, and our bosses will most likely never ask us how many apples Cindy has, if her number is the derivative of the number of apples Billy has. Its nice to understand the ideas and concepts, but the occasion where we wont have access to information, especially in a subject we did not specialize in (and therefore probably aren't working in) is so rare, that we just don't need to be tested in that manner.