Finals

It's that time of year again when finals are starting to roll around. Students are getting anxious and are studying more than ever. On average, college students take anywhere between four to six classes each semester which leads to about three to five finals at the end of the year. My questions for you are: should colleges have finals, should the finals be cumulative, and when should they be given. 

To answer my first question, I think that colleges should have finals. Finals are a great way to see if the student should really pass the class or not. Without finals, a student may slide through the year by cheating on homework and studying enough for tests to remember the information for a small period of time. Having finals makes the student learn the information well enough to the point where they will still remember the information months later. At that point, the student has embedded the information into their brain and will most likely remember it for a lot longer than just a couple months. 

To answer my second question, I think that finals should cover all the information that was taught throughout the semester. What would be the point of giving an exam that only covers what the students have learned recently and slapping on the name, "Final?" What I don't like about the current finals at South Dakota State University is the timing of them.

Throughout most of my classes so far at South Dakota State University, I have taken finals that occur less than a week later than the last exam in a class. The professors are rushing the finals and are not giving hardly any time to move on to them. If I were to give out finals, I would like to have at least a week, not just one review day, to go over what we have learned throughout the whole entire semester. This would give students a better review of the information. Another problem that I have with the current finals at South Dakota State University (and I am assuming most other universities) is that most finals fall on top of each other. With how much weight the final exams have on grades, it is very stressful as a student to take two finals that fall back-to-back to one another which are 20% to 30% of the grade in each course. If I could set it up myself, I wouldn’t allow students to have more than two finals a day, and not allow them to be less than a couple hours apart. Finals are great for testing knowledge in our students, but only when they are given in a respectful amount of time. 

Coding in the Classroom

Coding can be a useful tool in a classroom but isn’t as widely taught as some people may think. Coding is essentially the process of writing commands that a computer follows to carry out a task. The skill of coding is useful in creating many applicable things we use every day like video games, websites, applications, and much more. So, how can we teach and use coding in the classroom?

Coding, by its nature, requires a certain threshold of patience and problem-solving to be successful, two very important things to have and learn when entering the real world. There is a lot of trial and error that goes with coding, and being able to stomach that is important.  Coding also improves a student’s knowledge of how a computer works. When going about their everyday tasks, people that know and understand code can see the various background processes that go into a computer and can see that some websites or social media are coded in a way to make you use their apps as much as possible. This also allows students to become digital creators. The world today is almost always centered around technology and your ability to use it. Being able to create a program that may be useful to others can help students set themselves up for the future. So, how can you teach coding in the classroom?

The skills of patience and problem-solving required for coding are also used in every mathematics classroom. Coding in math can be used to solve complex problems that are too tiresome to calculate by hand or be used to have students create a step-by-step program to better show student understanding. That does not mean coding is limited to just the math classroom though. You can apply coding to any subject matter or classroom you can think of.  For example, let’s say you are in a writing class, and you want students to write a short story.  Have the students code a MadLib-type story where you input words to create different stories.  You could also have the students share each other’s programs so they could see many different stories.

Overall, I feel coding can be an important skill to have in today’s world. To some people (me included), coding can be scary, and we tend to avoid it. However, teaching coding to the younger generation that will enter a world full of technology and algorithms will help set them up for a brighter future.