Category Archives: Final Exams

Gamifying the French Classroom

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Last year, I attended a workshop put on by the French Consulate entitled “Gamifying the French Classroom.” It was interesting but not as practical as I would have liked–most of the games were for purchase or required software I don’t have.

Ever since attending that workshop last April, I’ve been trying to think of how to bring more of a gamified feel to my projects and units. Students respond well to Quizlet Live, Kahoot, and Jeopardy! in my classroom, so why not make learning more entertaining and ultimately more engaging? After reading Amanda’s blog in the fall about her final exam review passport (and also attending her group’s Grab-and-Go PD session last month), I felt compelled to rethink my finals review as we wind down the year and make the push towards exam week.

Let me back up a few steps first. For the final unit of the year in French 3, I’ve decided to modify the traditional food unit and teach students about food trucks, regional French cuisine, and the food truck culture in Paris which I experienced firsthand over the past three summers working in Paris.

I called my unit “The Great Food Truck Race.” To determine their groups for this final unit and project, students selected from random cards I made with French regions written on them. Earlier this week, they researched their assigned regions, local cuisine, and points of interest. From there, each group designed an origial food truck and a logo after learning about their regional cuisine. I think they’ve been having fun with the project-based learning aspects of this unit, but I wanted to tap into the “race” aspect of this unit as we make our way to finals week.

And that’s when it struck me. Instead of doing a “finals review” week or a few random days here and there, why not design an entire unit around a series of review activities?

The idea is simple: each week, I am hosting a series of competitions that really aren’t much different from the typical language exercises, activities, and worksheets we’ve been working on all year. The only difference is how I’m framing these competitions.

I’ve set up a Google Spreadsheet that the students have access to in order to keep a running tally of how many points they score during each competition which constitutes the ongoing “food truck race.” By the end of these next three weeks, the group with the most amount of points will earn a small bonus on the final exam. I introduced the rules earlier this week and the excitement which greeted my announcement was unlike anything I’ve seen all year. You would have thought I’d told them they could be on their phones every class from here on out…

The “competitions” include the following activities (along with several more I’m still mentally figuring out):

  • The Price is Right game in French to review food words, quantities, and numbers
  • A Jeopardy! review of food vocab from French 1-2
  • An upcoming quiz on the conditional mood we covered during the fall semester (which I’ll let them take in partners and score purely for race points and not for the overall grade)
  • Subjunctive verb conjugation speed races to review material from two units ago
  • Instagram challenges in which I’ll assign a task and judge the videos based on creativity and use of language
  • Speaking quizzes (formerly known as “oral exams”)
  • And then more traditional assignments for this current food truck unit such as creating a realistic menu, hosting an “interview” with a local journalist and their food truck, writing up an in-class business proposal without the assistance of Google Translate or a French-English dictionary, researching French outdoor games and proposing a special Happy Hour with games of their choosing, and so forth.

After only two in-class competitions, I’m already seeing more participation and engagement than I’ve seen in past classes. I hope the momentum continues into the remaining weeks, but so far it’s been fun to teach and keeps me on my toes in terms of thinking about how to make each review session more successful, engaging, and fun!

And best of all, I’m tricking my students into studying and fully participating in French.

For now, I leave you with some of their initial food truck designs as their posts are trickling in all weekend.

The case for not grading final exams

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There is talk around Carondelet about the value of final exams. Rather than a mere rehash of what students learned during the semester, final exams should have the potential of elevating students to a higher plane of learning. A great final exam gives students the opportunity to synthesize the most important ideas they have learned and apply those ideas in new contexts.

Although final exams are a very useful culminating activity, I hate grading them. So, I would like to propose an alternative.

Here are two reasons why students should grade their own final exams:

  1. Evaluating your own performance is the ultimate metacognitive activity. Students could complete an extra assignment after their final exam that leads them through a metacognitive process. Students will be required to justify their final exam grade through a number of criteria. Students will continue to learn even after the final exam!
  2. At least in my classes where I give lots of assignments and tests throughout the semester, final exam scores rarely influence the student’s semester grade. Is this the case in your classes? If so, then why should we grade those exams? In the self-grading scenario, teachers grade only the final exams that move a student’s semester grade up or down.
Please respond to this post if you think I should (or not) pilot this new grading system.

Why do I get anxious for finals? I’m not the one taking them.

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Every time I sit down to grade finals I have a mild panic
attack. Granted – I am prone to over thinking and anxiety anyway – but I don’t
have this with grading at any other point in the year. 
      Questions swirling around
my head;

  •       Was my final good enough? What makes a final a
    final anyway??
  •       If my students didn’t stress out over my final
    did I even do my job?
  •       Why didn’t I write a better rubric? Why didn’t I
    foresee the glitches?
  •       How much should this assessment impact my student’s grade this late in the semester?
  •       How would another (better) teacher grade this?
    Do I really know what I am doing?
  •       Did I grade too hard? Was I way too soft? –
    Probably the latter honestly.
  •       Are my grades too high? I really am happy with
    the work have done but shouldn’t my grades be more like a bell curve than a Nike
    swoosh?
  •       How does someone go to summer school for religion
    anyway??
  •        Should I let students know that the grades are in in
    case they want to see them before Christmas Would that just be chaos?
  •      Ah.

Anyway – my grades are in. Per my usual I went over
everything 10 times to make sure there were no surprises. Is this a new teacher
thing? Is this a crazy person thing? Does anyone else question the heck out of
themselves before submitting grades?

Exam Review Success!

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It’s that time of year again when we are wrapping up our courses and expecting our students to be reviewing and solidifying all of the material we covered in preparation for the semester final exam. At this point, we as teachers are really burnt out and it’s so tempting to just provide free periods and a review packet. That’s what I did last year, and the results weren’t pretty. I really underestimated my student’s ability to self-motivate and handle a large body of information all at once.  They’re as burnt out as we are and with the flexibility of free periods, many wasted the periods or used them really ineffectively.

This year I was determined to push myself to try something different and to not leave my students to handle review on their own.  I wanted them to have to complete tasks and achieve a certain mastery goal per chapter, before moving on to a new chapter. In talking casually with Kristina Levesque, she mentioned that she had used a passport style of review before and this idea really resonated with me.  I want my students to feel that learning math is a journey, an experience, so what better analogy to this is the idea of having a passport to document their journey back through the chapters we’ve covered.

I created a passport with a combination of three components each chapter:  [1] Make a Chapter-specific study guide, [2] Correct any errors on the chapter test, and [3] do an online review problem component.  [In AP Statistics there was an added component to do an online free response problem per chapter]. I gave them a full week class periods and no additional homework to complete the passport with a due date of Friday December 14th.  

Here’s a little more on each component:

[1] Study Guide:  Each day I offered an optional workshop of a review of a chapter we had covered.  If they wanted to attend the workshop, they could write down what I said and call that their study guide.  These workshops were quite brief, however, and most students found success making their own study guide beforehand and then filling in any gaps covered in my workshop.  I put the to-be-covered topics on the board at the beginning of class with the time my workshop would start.




[2] Test Corrections:  While some teachers require their students to correct tests upon their return, I’ve never been organized enough to coordinate that.  But, I think this ended up being a blessing in disguise! It was so great to watch students go back to old tests and wrestle with their errors, with the not being fresh in their mind.  Another neat (frustrating?) component was that if a student had lost their test, I gave them a blank test to do again.  I told them this was like losing their parking garage ticket: they have to pay full price. But, as I told them, think of how lucky they are to get to do all of that practice!

[3] Online practice:  This was probably my favorite component.  There are so many great online platforms and I was able to find different ones to meet the needs of all of my different classes.  In PreCalculus, I used MyMathLab which we use anyway as a homework supplement. This program had pre-made Chapter posttests which I was able to edit based on what we had covered.  In AP Statistics, I used Kahn Academy which has instruction, quizzes and tests already made for our course topics. I assigned the topic tests for each of our topics. In Algebra 2 I made my own quizzes using GoFormative.com, a super easy (and free!) platform to create auto-gradable quizzes and practice.

What I like about all three of these is that they all promote a growth mindset: students are given immediate feedback (and in some cases hints) and they can try as many times as they’d like until they achieve mastery (which for me was around 70-80% depending on the course).



What I love about this passport system is that it motivates all types of students.  I told them that I would enter a test grade based on how far they get through the passport.  If they did it all on time, they get a 100% test grade. If they don’t get very far, they could get as low as a 50% test grade added in right at the end of the semester.  Those with high or low semester averages had a reason to complete the passport on time.

I know we’re too busy to be visiting each other’s classrooms in this final push, but I wish you could see the energy and focus of my students as they use these class periods so productively.  They have pride as they ask me to sign off on their achievements. They’re coming in during lunch, after school and yesterday my x block was hopping with students learning from their mistakes and trying to solidify their knowledge of Algebra 2 concepts.  I’ve never seen them work so hard!

I plan to give them a survey after the exam to see how they liked this process.  I also want to see how their exam grades are related to their progress on the passport.  I’ll follow up here with those results. For now, even though I’m exhausted and every period is super busy as I balance giving brief chapter reviews and check off each student one by one, I feel like I’m finally serving my students and giving them a really tangible way to do final exam studying which can otherwise be really daunting.  And hopefully, if this all worked the way it was supposed to, they’ll simply have to review their already gathered materials from the passport experience the night before their exam. They’ll come in feeling rested and ready. Stay tuned!

Using Final Exams to Predict AP Exam Results

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Trying to keep AP students on track to do well on the AP exam
can be a daunting task. In the six years that I have been teaching AP Calculus,
I am constantly trying to figure out the optimum amount of guidance versus
independence to use with the students. Some students will do well no matter how
much I push them in class to prepare but others will, for whatever reason,
choose to minimize preparing for their AP Calculus exam so they can focus on
other things. One thing I chose to do differently this year was the 2nd
semester final exam.

AP Calculus students like to try to convince me to not give
them a final exam for the 2nd semester because they feel so busy
preparing for all of their AP exams. One year, I gave in and did not have a 2nd
semester final. However, when that year produced the highest percentage of
scores of “1” earned by my students on the AP exam, I recognized that there was
a correlation to the final exam and preparation for the AP exam. My first change
was to schedule the final exam to coincide with the last block period before AP
testing began. This helped somewhat. My most recent change was to the format of
the final exam itself. My 2nd semester Calculus final exam had not
been cumulative and was also completely multiple choice. This year, though, I
completely revamped my final exam to be cumulative for the entire course and I
based it on an actual unpublished AP exam. In order to get student buy-in I had
to promise to curve the final exam just like they do the actual AP test. I used
the scoring rubrics assigned by the College Board for the FRQ’s and used the
College Board’s point spreads to assign scores from 5 to 1 for each of my
students. I then crunched the data and correlated the scores to percentages to
enter into Powerschool as the final exam grade.
When the AP scores were published in July, I was anxious to
see how well I predicted the students’ scores. In over half of my students
(54%), the final exam score predicted the actual AP score. 31% scored one point
lower than predicted, 13% scored one point higher than predicted and only 1
student scored 2 points lower than predicted by the final exam. I am pleased
with my accuracy but at the same time I wonder why I was still wrong about
almost half of them. Here are my thoughts:
  1.  I only gave them the “Calculator allowed” questions in order to keep the length of test appropriate to the amount of time in a block period. Some students are better at answering questions using their calculator than they are when they don’t have access to one.
  2. Maybe I didn’t adhere to the grading rubric for the FRQ as stringently as I ought to have done.
  3. Maybe learning their “predicted” score had a psychological effect on how the students continued to prepare for the exam.

1.      I am now trying to explore the possible meanings of my 3rd
point. I think that there were a handful of students who were predicted to not
pass with a score of 2 who then took the attitude of “I’m so close. Maybe if I
work a little harder I can get a passing grade on the AP exam” and were then
able to improve their score. I also wonder though if some of the students who were
predicted a 3 on the exam then became overconfident and felt that they had
already prepared enough and then ultimately failed to pass the AP exam. This
year I plan to use the same exam format and will be extra careful on how I
grade the FRQ’s. Most importantly, though, I plan to very carefully help frame
their predicted outcome to motivate the students who need a little more work to
pass the exam and to warn other students of the dangers of complacency,
particularly if they barely earned a 3 on their final exam.

Design-Thinking the Final Exam Review Process

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In an effort to put my students in the driver seat of our Geometry Exam review, and to help them see the connections of what we’ve studied this year, I tried a new review format that mimicked much of the design thinking activities I’ve engaged in, in the past. In advance of our week-long review period, I asked my students to make a list of everything we learned this year.  Then, on the first day of review I divided them into four groups and give each group a large board and lots of sticky notes.  They had 5 minutes to get everything they wrote down on the board (one concept per sticky note). The one rule throughout the process was that they could never refer to a chapter or section. They couldn’t say, “Section 4.3,” for example. They had to know what CONCEPT was covered in that chapter and use real math vocabulary as opposed to artificial chapters and sectioning. See video here.

Then all groups rotated.  Each group ended up at another group’s board full of stickies and they were instructed to group and organize them into larger topics, much like we’ve done with our design thinking work this year.  Again they had five minutes. See video here.

 Then they all rotated again. For this round they could add any stickies that were missing and they were also encouraged to make arrows connecting stickies to multiple topics. See video here.

 Finally they rotated again for five minutes with the same instructions. See video here.

 At the end they went back to their original board and digested what was in front of them. See final boards here, here, here and here.
I chose to do this for the following reasons:


  • So often our teaching, reviews and even assessments are organized by chapter.  In an effort to make sure we cover everything, our reviews and tests follow the chapters of the textbook: Two questions from chapter 1, then a few from chapter 2 and so on and so forth.  A predictable set of unrelated problems where a student might be able to (and a teacher definitely could) draw the lines where one chapter ends and another begins. Instead, I wanted these students to see the interconnectedness between the CONCEPTS (not chapters) we had learned.
  • I wanted them to see topics written by their peers that perhaps they didn’t think about.
  • I wanted them to be at the center of the review process.  Instead of me providing the review content, they had to generate it.  
This was a nice activity for this seventh period class.  They were up, active and very engaged in what they were doing.  Much moreso than if I had led the review or provided a review packet to complete (I did eventually do this).  When I asked how they liked this process, they were overall positive but they did say over and over that they wished I had given them the topics they needed to know.  This is not surprising given the cultural change we are trying to make in the Math department:  away from teacher-centered direct instruction and more toward student-centered discovery.  We still have a lot of work to do but this was a fun way to change up the Final Exam review process and continue to move us in that direction.