By Robin Shin

Online Editor

Instructors at Bakersfield College are required to give a final at the end of each semester, and many of them have mixed emotions and thoughts on the outcome and even the final itself.

Rosa Garza, a Chicano history professor, stated that to her any exams are important.

“It allows you to see how the students are doing,” said Garza. “Mine are usually multiple choice, true and false, fill-ins.”

Garza changes her finals every year due to the fact that in the previous years, a student took a copy of the exam and all the students knew the answers before the exams were given. “So I don’t let them keep the exam themselves,” she said.

When asked of what he thought of giving finals, Wayne Cooper, a BC chemistry professor, stated that he had mixed emotions.

“How do you really evaluate what someone gets out of your class?” stated Cooper. “Now if you had a good way to look into an individual’s mind and looking at the gray cells and see what they have left there when they go out of your class, it would be easy, but in a sense then, finals are kind of a double-edged sword.”

Cooper then went onto add that it is necessary to give a final and that it gives him the feel of what his students get out of his class, but his real question is: Do the finals really tell what the students got out of his class?

He also said that he doesn’t expect his students to know everything about his class, because if they did then they would be the ones teaching the class, not him.

Cooper’s advice to those who struggle with finals is, “start preparing the first day of class.”

Jack Pierce, a BC geology and earth science professor, stated that he finds finals necessary because it looks at the student’s comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter over the semester.

He gives multiple choices and essays for his finals, which doesn’t really have a right answer.

“The essay questions gives how they would logically answer a question,” stated Pierce. “There’s a correct answer as to the logic behind it.”

“We have a lot of smart students in Bakersfield College, but there is a portion of them that don’t prepare and so then it looks like they don’t know,” said Pierce of some students who do a bad job on finals due to lack of preparation. “But I think they are bright.”

Devlin Kelly, a BC biology professor and Levan Scholar, stated that she isn’t sneaky when it comes to finals. “It’s pretty straight forward.  They know what they need to know, they know what they need to learn.”

Kelly has a Twitter, Facebook and even a podcast for her lectures so that her students could get all the help they need in order to pass her class.

Both Kelly and Pierce’s advice to taking a final is to get a good night sleep. Pierce shared his experience as a student.

“I remember when I was doing my bachelor’s degree,” he said. “I would just labor all night in terms of studying everything and anything in order to try and perform well on the final exam in San Diego State.”

Pierce went on to say, “then I became a graduate student at the University of Idaho and I had my finals. I basically studied what I thought was necessary and had a good night sleep, and I did much better than I did in San Diego State.  I think it’s because I had a good night sleep, I really do.”