Final Evaluations

Many of our classes do not have required exams but project reviews or assignments instead. For the rest of our timetable, around the time that our other courses have exams, we're supposed to have a small break. However, it doesn't seem to work; it all just carries on regardless. Each Prof continues to make large demands on your time, and it is difficult to begin exam study early enough, or to do it thoroughly enough, for you to do as well as you otherwise could. If everyone has the same schedule though, there can be power in numbers if you take advantage of it. It has happened that we all cried out to the Prof who seemed to have forgotten about the exams: "Stop, you know us; you know we're not whiners, but give us a break just for this week!" And then some students catch on to that and try this technique later on when our timetables are more diverse, the student front isn’t unified and the power isn’t there. Then it degenerates into a sad, droning whine.

Another part of our evaluation is the Review, which is a project presentation and discussion. We work on it for weeks, put it on the wall or make a presentation of it, and then present it to the entire class, the Prof, and maybe other Profs or people outside the school as well. After your presentation, there are questions and comments you're expected to respond to.

Sometimes the comments seem frustratingly unconcerned with what you had perceived as the topic of your Review. Your first reaction might be annoyance that the person hasn't caught on to what you were trying to do. It's not advisable to respond in that way, though. You have to say something intelligent, so you need to put an emotional distance between you and the situation. One of the purposes of the exercise is to broaden your horizons on your work, and to stimulate ideas which otherwise you might not have had. So when they raise questions that you hadn't thought about, you have to respond by drawing a connection. You can say something like, "I hadn't thought of it from that viewpoint, but yes, I can see that the effect of that might be..." If you can do that intelligently, it can actually help you. Other times though, the question you're asked can be so far out of whack that all you can say is, "No, I hadn't thought of that."

It pays to get to know the Profs. They all have things they regard as important, and with some, it seems that they have an agenda all their own. So you know that they'll be pleased if you approach the topic from a direction that's at least consistent with their point of view.

A good thing about this way of doing things is that when you make your presentation, you're the expert on the topic. It could well be that you know more than anyone else in the room, including the Profs. More and more as you go on in the discipline, the Review becomes something like an equal conversation. The project you have is not a simple one; it's complicated, and there isn't an easy solution. You are basically a practitioner, and the difference between you and the Profs is that they have done more of it than you have. But on your topic, it's more of a conversation between equals. The Profs, and they accept it, are learning from you as well as the other way


It's a tense time though, overall, because so much is being evaluated in so short a time, and if you get off on the wrong foot, it can be very hard to regain control of the situation. That would be true of an exam as well. But in the Review, a lot depends not just on how good your actual work is, but on how you present it. Things happen in the Review that can totally throw you off guard in a way that wouldn't be so in an exam. Your reaction to what comes across as an off-track question can antagonize people. Or you can say something stupid. In an exam, you could just erase it; if you've said it, and everyone has heard, it's not so easy.

But I can't imagine a program like ours that didn't have something like our Review. It captures aspects of our ability and our achievement that a mere exam could never do.