Shouting into the void in a way, but it is so soul crushing to work as hard as you can for an entire semester, keep your grades up, study 8+ hour days for finals, and then make just one dumb error to lose your entire grade...

I believe we should have final projects replace final exams. You end up spending just as much, if not more, time preparing and writing results, and you can also demonstrate a more holistic understanding of the class material.

Obviously it puts much more of a strain on the professors grading the assignments, since 30 10 page papers can be much harder to grade than 30 exams. I think there has to be some sort of solution where you can compromise the two, but I don’t know of it yet.

Final projects also serve as a great bridge between academics and research. In my 1.5 years working at GTRI, I’ve never had to sit down and solve a problem within 3 hours, but I have been given a difficult problem I needed to research, analyze, and write up a complex solution to.

Maybe this is just recency bias talking, but my brain gets fried after multiple 3 hours exams. When you have up to 50% of your course grade lying on those 3 hours, a single bad day can change your semester's 95% to a 85% easily.

Putting it in the context of this semester, we've had no breaks, less time to learn, more external stress, less social interaction, 8+ hours of sitting in front of a computer, and now some people are dealing with large changes in their environment.

I don't see how you can expect a single final given less than a week after Thanksgiving break can expect to be a fair and comprehensive measurement of your knowledge at the end of the day.

Then throw in 3-5 of them within a week, and make your entire semester depend on the outcome of the performance. I don't fully understand how this is the best way we can measure a student's understanding.

With project and homework focused courses, you can actually cultivate personal ownership of your knowledge. You get to see how you can expand on what you've been taught, and it teaches you the importance of critical thinking and honestly just hard work.

If the importance of your coursework is that you show future employers/schools your mastery of a topic, then projects make even more sense. You get to demonstrate that you don't just know how to solve contrived problems, but that you can use your coursework in real ways.

Every single time I've had to do projects for my physics courses, I come out of it with a renewed passion for the field. It is incredibly rewarding to put the pieces together and come out with an answer.

It might be the optimist in me, but I believe that if you give a student the ability to take a sense of pride and personal ownership in the work and studying they do, then they'll perform better than they would otherwise.

In my experience, studying for tests doesn't really make me excited to learn more about the material after the test finishes. Some people might work that way, but not me. There isn't the same sort of sense of ownership when I look at a stack of practice problems...

Probably one of the largest reasons I'm still in physics today is thanks to my first, and one of the best, physics professors I've had, @YunkerLab. His course incorporated a final project.

He let us take a difficult problem, research its moving parts, apply what we learned that semester to come to an answer, and then write up a readable analysis explaining the process. It was the first time I ever thought learning could be exciting.

At the end of the day, I really believe that learning is exciting. I think that pretty simple takeaway gets lost in many of the courses I've taken, which is a shame.

I'm incredibly thankful to the professors who have shown and reminded me of that. I really don't know a 'solution' to the issue, or if a lot of people feel the same way, but I hope that cultivating a passion for knowledge doesn't get lost in exam after exam.

For the people who read through my ramble about exams, final projects, and teaching, thanks for sticking around. Be sure you're wearing a mask and staying safe out there. I've got to get back to exam prepping!