Associate Deans and Department Heads

Dear Colleagues:

As many of you know, three years ago, the University Senate passed a by-law change regarding final assessments in all undergraduate classes. The change enabled all faculty and instructors in our undergraduate courses to choose to use various assessment of student work, stating that final exams are no longer mandated. Many of our faculty have used other forms of assessment such as projects, shorter quizzes during the semester, papers, team based work, and other assessments in lieu of final exams during the last three years. The change also eliminated the approval of the Department and of the Dean of the School or College for faculty who choose not to offer a final examination.

Please circulate this memo to your faculty in order for us to gather some very important information. We would like to know which of your faculty has decided NOT to administer a final examination during the scheduled exam week. As you know, we are currently trying to eliminate the bunched finals effect of having too many exams scheduled in any given day. We also do not have enough rooms for all of the final exam slots that are currently scheduled.  Since we have learned anecdotally that some of our faculty are not actually utilizing rooms that are assigned to them as they are using other forms of assessment, we may be able to make their rooms available for other faculty. This will help us to ensure that we have fewer make-up exams to administer.

We have developed a brief form for faculty who are not administering a final exam. Please ask each faculty who chooses this option to take a few minutes to complete the form so that we can help resolve the bunched finals and space problems. Thank you for helping us with this very important task.

http://registrar.uconn.edu/final-exam-opt-out/

John C. Volin

Vice Provost for Academic Affairs