A weeklong trek through a well-deserved torment was what the last five days of spring quarter were like for me. Thanks to the most unabashed procrastination I had committed since high school, I found myself saddled with over 55 pages of papers to write in five days, along with one conventional identification final test.
In order to curb procrastination, professors tend to have cumulative multiple choice or identification finals which test your ability to memorize rather than to understand. Other professors assign research papers of 20 pages or more as a means of curbing procrastination, but these papers can, if necessary, be written at the last minute.
Unfortunately, neither long papers nor ID tests require much actual intellectual application by the student, and as such, can be tackled at breakneck speed during finals week.
Despite what professors say, you can get A’s by starting your work at the last minute. You may lose valuable sleep, you may consume ungodly amounts of chemical-ridden energy drinks, and you may not even be able to see straight after it all, but you can put off all your work until finals week and still get decent grades. Without that possibility, my GPA would be a lot lower, but the possibility shouldn’t exist in the first place.
It has been my experience that professors who use their class as a vehicle to teach their own theory of how the world works often end up assigning students with term papers which ask, quite unsurprisingly, how the world works. So, you simply end up regurgitating everything the professor has said in lecture.
Open-ended term papers are slightly better, since doing the research itself will force you to think about why you’re using one scholarly article over another to support your thesis. At the end of the day, however, these long papers are still writable in less than two full days for many people, and at A levels.
Papers, though time-consuming, require very little actual knowledge of the course before writing the paper. Identification tests, on the other hand, often test you on small portions of the course rather than the core tenets of the course, and you’re expected to know that small portion as though it was the whole course.
ID tests don’t measure an in-depth understanding of a topic but simply how much about that topic a student could memorize. Unfortunately, most social science classes are a combination of these two grading methods.
If a professor really wants to gauge whether a student is actively engaged in the material of the course, more intensively graded discussion sections would be a welcome change. If we lived in a perfect world, every class would have 20-person discussion sections with fair teaching assistants who, because of the more intimate setting, could easily gauge students’ understanding and mastery of the material through simple observation.
Sadly, many classes which need discussion sections don’t have them, and those that do tend to devalue the section by making it only 10 percent of a student’s grade.
Another potential method to curb procrastination and to get students engaged in material is to have periodic quizzing. Unfortunately, class sizes are far too large to administer these quizzes without headaches, and many of these quizzes often ask students to remember details of a reading that are difficult to memorize and unimportant in general.
Of course, not all methods of evaluation at UCLA are flawed. One such method is the in-class essay. These essays require students to come into the final with knowledge of the entire course. Professors hand out the possible prompts ahead of time, which allows students to go over their lecture notes for each possible prompt. This method forces students to know all the material for a course as long as the prompts are well constructed, and it seems to me the best way to evaluate a student’s knowledge.
Professors have incredibly tough jobs at UCLA, and grading remains a large part of that. I cannot profess to have the perfect solution, but some professors need to alternate their grading so that students aren’t given the option of leaving it all until finals week.