[datr]

Cambridge does this as well and I can't say I was a fan. In mathematics, three years of learning ends up being evaluated through five three-hour exams administered over the course of a week. All it takes is one to fall ill for that week and all of a sudden you don't get a grade. The best case scenario is you can convince the examination board your illness contributed to your performance and they might award you a DDH (Deemed to have Deserved Honours) which no one will really understand.

[lordnacho]

I went to Oxford, and this actually happened to me. I got ill during exams, and there's no mercy. I sat in the exam halls sweating, unable to breathe properly, trying to hand-compute an analysis of variance calculation. And a bunch of other trivial stuff like singular value decomposition and other linear algebra riddles.

I actually think having one big exam at the end isn't great. There's so much on the line you end up "learning" things too quickly, in a way that's focused on previous exam questions rather than actually learning stuff. And the stuff is actually interesting.

Perhaps a pass/fail system would be better, spread out a bit. The problem with the system is that incremental gains in the exam result are favoured over learning that's hard to quantify.

[sjg007]

Yeah this is just the professors being lazy... The grief of having to write more tests and be accountable!