Best Final Exam

If I've already told you this, I apologize, but here is one of the best final exams I know of. I have seen a video of it, including the student presentations.

Students in an 8th grade science class have been working as partners in the lab all year. At the end of the year, as a final exam, the teacher gives each pair a "mystery substance" to analyze. Students are to hypothesize what it might contain and then do the work necessary to determine what the substance is. They create a data chart and draw conclusions. Each pair then makes a presentation to the rest of the class on the process they used to determine what their mystery substance was. Both must speak, and there must be at least one visual, perhaps a data chart reproduced on the overhead or Smartboard. There is a rubric for A, B, C, and failure. The items in the rubric are the components of the scientific process that students have been learning about and practicing all year. This is a test of the progress they have made in applying that process to solving a scientific "problem".

--Dr. James Lee, Saint Joseph's University