After experiencing giving final exams to my students at the end of the fall semester, I decided that I would not give final exams during spring semester. Now before you start thinking I am a lazy teacher or something, I will tell you what happened. So remember that weekend excursion that I went on with the other foreign teachers and Chinese professors? I was able to have many of my questions concerning the final exams answered during that time. What I found out was not very uplifting.
To start things off, I found out my Oral English class is only worth ten percent of the total English grade of each student (that explains why I only have a twenty five percent class attendance). So by estimates I should have about four hundred students combined in my eight classes that I teach. WOW! That means I have to give about four hundred oral exams within one week. So I asked questions concerning time and space to be able to give all of the exams. Can we have a room reserved for each of us to take these exams? Can we have students use class time, lunch time and the early afternoon to take their exams? These requests were simply out of the question (there goes my idea of a three minute final per student). We got laughed at when we asked for a reserved room and my question concerning using out of class time to give the exams was answered with another question “But when will the students be able eat their lunch and take their nap?” At this point it really dawned to me that we were not being taken seriously by anyone so I was not going to give a final exam that could be taken seriously. So I decided to give each student a one minute oral final exam with me. It was the only way I could get through all of the students within the class periods. It was a bad idea.
Now the final exam was only sixty percent of the total grade and the remainder was class attendance. So how was I going to remember the students who have either shown up to class all of the time, most of the time, some of the time, or never. All I could do was estimate because we were never given a class list for any of our classes. I knew I was going to see many unfamiliar faces and the best I could give them was a D if they completed the final exam. I thought I was very fair. I gave better grade to students I recognized and I only failed students who did not show up for the final (I wouldn’t know who they were otherwise), if they didn’t complete the final, if they couldn’t understand my very simple questions or if they just were silent beside the occasional “umm”. I have some very memorable examples of each.
There were only a couple students who did not complete the final exam. One student tried to recite a paragraph that he had memorized (very commonly occurred by many students who all tried to talk about their hometown) but had run out of material after thirty seconds. I tried to engage him in conversation by asking him simple questions but he just didn’t understand anything that I said. He would just respond with, “Thank you teacher, bye bye”. Eventually he walked away from me even after I told him that he had not finished the exam. Another student who walked away from me was a very weird fellow. He was one of my students who would just use my class as a study hall and would try to pretend that I was not there when I would try to get him to talk. During his exam he spoke gibberish for twenty seconds before stopping mid-gibberish, twitched his neck and then stormed out of the building after a brief second of awkward silence.
I also did have some fun with the students who would stick around for the full minute but would only recite a short twenty second speech about their hometown. I would try to help them by asking them simple questions about their home time like, “What is the food like”, or “what is famous in your hometown?” But usually they would just stare off into the corners of their eyes in silence or mumble “na’ge…….na’ge……” (“um” in Chinese).
Like I said earlier, giving a one minute oral final exam to four hundred students is a bad idea. I had to have the oral exams be taken outside the classroom in the freezing cold hallway (and usually I was for 60-90 minutes at a time before I got through all of them). Also giving determining sixty percent of someone’s total grade based off of a one minute oral exam is ridiculous. I have decided that I will not give a final exam next semester, but instead I will make attendance the one hundred percent of the grade by randomly taking attendance.
Since submitting grades I look back at this experience I see both agony and humor. I also now have a tremendous amount of respect for college professors.
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