As the end of the semester draws near, students are buckling down and preparing for the onslaught of finals – the last obstacle between them and the holiday break. And what an obstacle they are, in some cases counting for 40 percent of the final grade. There are no re-dos and unless you’re lucky enough to be graded on a curve, what you get is what you get. But is this the best to way to assess a student’s understanding of a course?

While final exams address the degree to which students remember the information taught to them in the course, they don’t ensure long-term effectiveness. Most students can attest that throughout their upper level courses professors tend to reteach old concepts before they can move on to the actual coursework. They will often make comments like, “You should already know this” or “Who was your professor last semester?”

This forgetfulness is because final exams leave no lasting impressions on students after they are over. There is nothing special about them. They are merely a speed bump at the end of the course. There is nothing to discuss and no reason to discuss it. It is a system that relies too heavily on conditional memorization. Students are forced to try and memorize everything covered in a semester to pass one heavily weighted assessment.

This does more harm than good. By covering everything, it becomes difficult to determine what is critically important and what is more supplementary. Questions can be specific and immersive but they still fail to give students a chance to apply concepts on their own in a real-life scenario.

But final exams are a simple way to efficiently assess a student’s comprehension at the end of a course. And that is why they are used.

A system dictated by ease and convenience can hurt students in the fast-paced college process. There needs to be room for students to think critically and express their knowledge in a way that is all their own. Questions on an exam set students up with everything but the solution; but if students had to start from the ground up and discover the problem on their own, it would change the game in terms of assessment.

Many nontechnical majors already adopt this strategy through the usage of final projects as a form of final evaluation. This gives the students a set of objectives and allows them to utilize the skills and concepts they have learned to achieve them. They have time to evaluate and improve their finished product and must have an understanding of the material to complete it.

For professors, it is also much easier to see a student’s line of thought and gauge the level of understanding through a final project. While it is more effort to grade, final projects will actually save time in upper level classes. By being made to produce something and come to their own conclusions, students will develop a lasting memory of the material through their work on the final project.

The more math-heavy majors might argue that a final exam is the only way to display mastery of various math skills, that on-the-spot problems ensure that a student can use the key concepts learned in class.

But isn’t the first question asked of any math teacher after a new formula is introduced, “When will we use this?”

By integrating formulas and concepts into larger initiatives, professors can get students to apply the same lessons to actual real life situations. When the immediacy of a test is removed, students will get invaluable experience thinking on their own to come up with an all-encompassing solution that transcends a simple numerical answer.

It’s 2013 – students have more resources available to them than ever before. Grades shouldn’t be so reliant on how well a student can remember certain information on a single day. Instead, they should be based on how well a student can apply the information to an immersive situation using the resources presented to them.

With a focus on experiential learning, Northeastern is the perfect place to revamp this outdated method of evaluation.