What’s your explanation for not expecting college professors or the state of California to justify such heavy emphasis on a summative assessment? I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to weight grades accordingly. I just ponder why you think high school (or elementary) teachers should have to justify it?

Now to your question. How much do I weight my final exam? First off, its not a separate category from my regular tests. That being said tests account for roughly 50% of their overall grade. The final is just another test. It is a cumulative test, but still just a test.

Is it worth more than formative assessments? Yes. How much? About double.

My grading breaks down to 50% test, 50% portfolio. Homework? Classwork? Participation? All part of their portfolio.

I am intrigued by your 70/30 break down though. Tests are important. Plain and simple.

In reference to your disdain for platitudes like NCLB forces teachers to “teach to the test,” I couldn’t agree more.

Who are these teachers that don’t teach to their test? Why do they assess? What’s the point of giving a test, if you are not preparing your students for it, by teaching the material/skills that will be covered?

What irks me about standardized testing is that I have little say in the creation of the standards and assessment tool. I have so far been disappointed by the validity of the CST in World History as an effective measure of what is expected to be taught.

To be honest, we need more emphasis on testing. There I said it. Luckily I don’t belong to a teacher’s union so I won’t have to worry about being ostracized. (I teach in a charter: no union, no tenure, yay!)

If the point of secondary schooling is to prepare students for college, then why isn’t there a bigger focus on testing and research? Because, if memory fails me, I don’t remember doing vocab worksheets in college, but I do remember research papers and those damn blue books (also very few multiple choice tests).

I stumbled upon this post and am happy to know that I am not the only one to buck the system. I don’t even like giving tests during the year as I don’t see how doing paper and pencil examples proves you know anything…except for maybe showing you know how to do paper and pencil examples. There is rarely a chance to show what you have really learned on a test. It is impossible sum it all up in 120 minutes or less.

I had many students (in my algebra class particularly) who did MUCH worse on their exam than they’d done the rest of the year. I like Per’s comments about the complexity of the final. I didn’t include problems like “Solve. 3x = 21” on the final, because I want my students to be able to use those skills to solve more complex problems. Some of my students could have told me that parallel lines have the same slope, and had memorized the point slope equation, but couldn’t put those two things together to write an equation of a line that’s parallel to a given line and goes through a given point.

A final exam is often a more accurate indicator of how much a student has actually LEARNED – as in, is able to recall and apply – rather than how good they are at cramming or memorizing for the short term. I believe that it does still have a place in the high school, but I’m not sure about the middle school.

No kidding. Heck, Steve, you’re the real celebrity. So what do you do with your two freebie hours then? Movies? Group projects? Presentations? Liars dice? And is it common knowledge among students and faculty that Mr. Lazar doesn’t do the whole final exam thing?

Well – I’m actually at a school now that doesn’t have final exams scheduled – a few teachers do give them, however, our emphasis is on project based assessment so my students have one major project each Trimester that works out to 25-50% of their grade.  However, this is a project that they work on for 25-50% of the semester.  With that said, my students have to pass the New York State Regents exam in Global History to graduate from high school (which I’m currently taking a break form grading), so that has a similar (though very unfortunate) effect to a final exam. At my last school in Virginia however, I did final presentations during finals period (the last one was to write and preform an episode of The Daily Show taking place at some other point in history).  To my knowledge, I was the only teacher who did this in my department (of 22 teachers).  At that school, they really only cared how students did on the Virginia Standards of Learning test (like NY, a graduation requirement), and my kids did better than the average for the school, so I was left alone.

In this way can the final decide a lot of the course grade. What use is it if the student knew how to calculate the slope of a line if he doesn’t remember how to do it a few weeks later? My student get about 4h at the final and it is one of the few occasion I have time to test many different areas at one time.

/Per