If you have taken enough classes in the Daniels College of Business recently, chances are you have had a professor who was less than enthusiastic about giving a significant final exam during the prescribed time. For whatever reason, Daniels professors are assigning a final project or paper instead of an exam or simply a lack of desire to formally write and administer a final, the fact has evidently been enough for Daniels leadership to demand that all professors have a legitimate final exam during the finals period designated for their class.

While a final is not always the best way to examine whether students have effectively learned the material, the spirit of the requirement needs to remain in place. A meaningful assessment needs to be given at the end of each class to ensure students have actually learned something and not skated by under the radar.

I have taken a good number of business classes in the past two years, and can attest than when a meaningful final is given, I take a lot more out of the class because I have to review all of the material at the end of the quarter. I have found that classes without finals are ones where I have been more prone to forget the material presented, even if there was a relatively easier final paper or final project in place of an exam.

This does not mean that every Daniels class needs to have a traditional final at the end of each quarter; I believe that is far too narrow-minded of an approach. After all, in the business world, you are not going to take an exam at work (with the exception of getting a certification or license for a skill), you are going to write a report, analyze something or give a presentation. These realities should be acknowledged in the final exam process.

However, it is far too easy for professors to use this as a way to assign a paper or project that is not of equal difficulty to an exam. I would not be opposed to banishing all finals at Daniels if they were replaced by a difficult and meaningful paper or project. The point of it is that students need to be rigorously assessed at the end of the class to determine if they truly learned the material, and cannot have an easy way to slither out of this responsibility and escape with an “A” that means nothing.

The step of requiring a legitimate and challenging assessment at the end of each class is the ultimate step needed to maintain DU’s integrity and academic ranking. In the meantime, the requirement that all Daniels classes have a final exam during the prescribed time period has a lot of merit, but is not the ultimate goal. We all pay a good deal of money to come to DU and earn a degree, and the integrity of this degree needs to be preserved for all students in Daniels.