Alternatives to Heavily-Weighted Final Exams in Engineering Courses
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In many engineering courses, cumulative final exams typically comprise the largest component of a studentâs grade. However, from a learnerâs perspective, final exams are frequently associated with high levels of stress, which may hinder student performance during the exam period. In this interactive engineering-focused workshop, I will discuss the challenges associated with final exams that are heavily- weighted and propose alternative forms of summative assessment of student learning. Through a demonstration of a survey conducted in a Civil Engineering class at the University of Waterloo, I will demonstrate studentsâ perspectives on final exams. Furthermore, using data from twenty-one engineering course outlines from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I will demonstrate common assessment approaches used in engineering courses. The workshop will conclude by asking participants to share ideas for alternatives to heavily-weighted final exams and will introduce some alternative methods of assessment that have been suggested in education literature.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it