The Curious History of "Take-Home Finals"
Bits and Pieces 2012-09-11
Summary:
Much ink has been spilled about the significance of the cheating alleged to have occurred in Harvard's "Introduction to Congress" course. There has been such a run on high moral dudgeon that the supplies must be running short. What does this unprecedented scandal say about the ethics of youth, about their eroding sense of intellectual property in the Internet age, about the blurred line between collaboration and copying? I suggested in a previous post that a deeper issue might be that large courses are sometimes run casually, or may even promote themselves as easy and fun in an attempt to swell enrollments. Students tend to take courses only as seriously as their instructors seem to be taking them. Over the weekend I was out of town and saw several alums at a party. They all asked the same question: What is this business of take-home exams anyway? There was a reason, they noted, that exams used to be proctored--it's called human nature. The greater the temptations, the easier the transgression, the more likely it is that people will sin. I don't know what percentage of courses now administer take-home exams rather than sit-down exams or some other form of evaluation (seminars are often graded on the basis of research papers, for example). I suspect there are a great many more non-final-exam-evaluations today than even two years ago. They may well be the norm rather than the exception. And that is because NO EXAM is now the DEFAULT OPTION. Until the fall term of 2010,courses gave final exams by default. Instructors could substitute a different form of evaluation if they made a timely request to the appropriate dean and explained what form of evaluation they wanted to use instead, and why. Starting four terms ago, the default was flipped, so that instructors are assumed to be using an alternate form of evaluation unless they make a request, by a certain date early in the term, to give a 3-hour, sit down final exam. Defaults are well known to be powerful signaling devices, indicating what is normal and expected. For example, otherwise similar societies in which people are assumed to be willing to have their organs donated after death, unless they specify otherwise in advance, have far higher organ donation rates than places where the default is the opposite. Even though in both cases individuals have complete control over the decision, by checking a box at the time of renewing their drivers' licenses, for example, the donation rates vary drastically depending on whether you check to opt in or check to opt out. So while I don't know the numbers, I imagine the number of final exams being administered has shrunk rapidly since two years ago when the default changed. And why was the default flipped? Because fall term exams were moved to before winter break. Huh? You see, professors were not very diligent about turning in those forms specifying what kind of exam they intended to give. The administration could not make up the exam schedule until they knew which courses were going to have final exams, so the the exam schedule tended to be posted late in the term. It was always a nuisance for students wanting to make their end-of-term plans not to know the date of their last exam. But the nuisance became a big cost item when fall term exams moved before Christmas, since airline ticket prices grow drastically as December 25 approaches. And Harvard was paying for a lot of those tickets, through its financial aid budget. So the solution was to change the default--no exam unless you asked for one, by a certain drop-dead date. No form to return any more, no email to respond to, unless you specifically want to given an exam. One other wrinkle: Final exams may be given only during exam period, and other forms of assessment must be completed by the end of reading period, which precedes exam period. So courses that do not give final exams (and instead, for example, give "take home finals"), are finished earlier than courses that give final exams--certainly done for the students, and potentially for the professor too, depending on the exact timing of the alternative assessment and how long it takes to grade. So altogether, there are pretty powerful incentives not to give final exams, and nobody is telling the faculty that they are educationally a good idea in spite of the disincentives. I include below the memo that was sent to faculty in the spring of 2010 explaining the rationale for changing the default. I was on Faculty Council at the