While their peers are busy filling out final exam booklets and
bubbling in scantrons during finals week, some students will be
acting, performing, making music ““ and having fun.
For students like music student Sonnet Simmons, the final
assessment of the quarter will lie, literally, at their
fingertips.
Simmons’ final in her jazz keyboard class will consist of
playing a tune once and then playing a second melody with different
chords underneath it.
Simmons is nervous for her final for a different reason than
most students at UCLA ““ she does not need to write an essay
on an unknown topic, but she is anxious because keyboard is not her
specialization in music.
Introduction to Keyboard, a course taught by Professor Axel
Schmitt, will also require students to play music for the
final.
“(Students) will play a piece by memory,” Schmitt
said. “The goal is for everybody to be able to
play.”
The keyboard course is for students who want to develop basic
piano skills to back up their existing talents. Schmitt said the
final exam will reflect the coursework, which resonates with the
students’ interest in music and is not written work.
Professor Ian Krouse teaches Composition, a course that gives
music students a chance to do what they love ““ compose music
of their own.
There is no final exam, but on the day of the final students
will present the product of their fall quarter coursework, a piece
they themselves composed.
“The whole course is centered around finishing an original
composition,” Krouse said. “In lieu of a final everyone
shows their finished scores to me and everyone else.”
Marco Cabrera, a first-year student, is studying design and
media arts and is taking Introduction to Design Culture, a class in
which his final is in the form of a creative product-designing
project.
“We have to actually draw out a product and present it in
a design-conscious way,” Cabrera said.
He added that the written part of the project, a description of
the product, is minimal.
Cabrera said the final project is very flexible. Students choose
any product they want to improve upon or create and design a
product using ideas they learned in class.
Cabrera is designing a hoverboard for his project ““
something like a skateboard that has a jet-propulsion system to
propel it and hovers by using magnets to repel the floor.
“It’s fun for me. It’s been a fun project.
It’s something I like to do and it’s not so
restrictive,” Cabrera said.
Cabrera said he wants his hoverboard to be as realistic as
possible. One design element he is incorporating into his
hoverboard is streamlining.
“(The professor) wants it to be very formal,” said
Cabrera about the final project. “He wants it to be in a
portfolio with the design of the product and how it’s going
to be constructed.”
Many students in UCLA’s theater program will also be
having finals that are more hands-on.
Vanessa Mizzone is a graduate student at UCLA who teaches an
acting, voice and movement course.
Part of the course, Mizzone said, is for students to shed their
familiar or speaking voices in order to find their innate natural
voices.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work all quarter on
finding that voice … also on diction and pronunciation and losing
the regionalism,” Mizzone said.
She said the sixteen students in her class are assigned homework
““ exercises and drills similar to those they do in class
““ to help them on their quest to find their natural voice and
speech.
Mizzone said the final is meant to assess how much work students
have put into the course, including whether or not they have been
practicing at home.
“The final is just going to consist of them incorporating
the vocal and speech stuff we have done,” Mizzone said.
“We’re going to apply it to a classical monologue
““ Shakespeare, any type of elevated language like a
poem.”
Mizzone said she feels her students are nervous about the final,
especially because there is a lot of competition in the theater
program and the final could essentially feel like a
performance.
“We’re not performing. This is a workshop.
Let’s just explore this together,” Mizzone said.
To those people who may say it is impossible to relive your
dreams, some theater students may beg to differ.
Megan Trimble, a first-year theater student, is nervous for her
final in Introduction to Performance – an exam that will require
her to perform in front of classmates.
“We get put in groups of ten people and we have to
collaborate and put together a five-minute dream,” Trimble
said.
She said her group will be recreating through performance a
dream ““ not a night-time escapade but actually a nightmare
““ that one of the group members had.
“Most dreams you don’t remember,” Trimble
said. “So we changed it a little.”
Trimble said the last couple of weeks in the quarter were
dedicated to rehearsal time and preparation for the performance of
the dream. She said Professor Michael Hackett, who teaches the
course, said in regards to the final, “you have to amaze
me.”
In a scenic design class she is taking, Trimble will try to
“sell” her work to the class on the day of the
final.
“We’ve been learning the whole quarter the basics of
drawing, how to draw a scenic design,” Trimble said.
The final will be the culmination of each student’s
talent, hard work and understanding of the material learned.
“We’ve had three checkpoints,” Trimble said.
“Our first one was just a rough sketch. Our second one was a
more finished version … a third version, the finished product, is
supposed to be really carefully drawn.”
This finished product will be a scenic design for a play the
students read, and will be a careful rendering that they will mat
and present to their classmates and the professor.
In a three-minute presentation the students will become
salespeople, peddling their goods ““ their scenic designs
““ to the class.
With all the conventional finals at UCLA fall quarter, many
students will still be sitting at desks with number-two pencils
ready.
Caesar Nicholson, a senior history student, said even though he
will be taking written finals, less conventional finals are a good
and perhaps even more meaningful way to assess student
progress.
“The point of finals is to find out what we learned,
express what we learned,” Nicholson said. “I think the
whole education system can be done in human expression.”