Are finals the final straw for students?

By Mason Poepperling / Staff writer

The end of the spring semester is here, and the dreaded time of year is approaching. The time where a sense of fear and dread can be felt upon all students who experience the worst horror they could possibly experience: Finals week.

As Hutchinson Community College students vigorously prepare for the tasks at hand, some have started to feel that the good old-fashioned final exam that students have come to know and loathe may actually be a little too old fashioned, and that final projects are the way of the future.

“A hands-on project showing attained knowledge and skills in a class is far superior to a randomly generated exam full of questions” said Heath Hensley, HutchCC Computer Support Specialist Instructor.

Some, however, believe that there are some cases where a final exam is necessary, as it’s not as easy to make a final project for some classes as it is for others.

“It just depends on the class,” Blake McDermott, a student at Hutchinson Community College, said. “With a lot of programming classes, exams just suck. Questions can be a bit ambitious and those classes are all about applications. With exams for a class like psychology, they just make sense.”

Others take a more middle of the road approach, believing that both have their place and are equally as effective if applied properly.

“As someone who studied history with finals both as projects and tests, they gave us tests throughout the course that covered everything” said Kelsey Dame, transfer specialist at HutchCC. “They were just given after every chapter or section. Both helped, but with a project I felt like I wasn’t studying the same thing over again for a final. I was doing my own research and applying the knowledge throughout the course.”

Whether or not HutchCC professors and instructors decide to start distancing themselves from old fashioned exams or not, it’s safe to say that both projects and exams have their place on the college campus, and whatever helps students with achieve their academic goals doesn’t seem like something to fear after all.

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