TOPIC: Qualtrics survey for students to vote on whether to make the final exam optional

Dear students,

This is a message from your coordinator about your final exam. Hello. I hope that you are managing: please do contact me (juliet.obrien@ubc.ca) if there’s anything I might be able to do, if you have questions and you’re not sure whom to ask, if there’s help that you need but you don’t know how to go about asking about it. I might be able to help, I should in any case be able to put you in contact with someone who *can* help you directly.

Some of you have asked if we have to have a final exam, and expressed worry about it. There have been enough of you asking this, in enough sections, for me to think that it would be a good idea to ask *all* of you what you think. In the COVID-19 exceptional circumstances, we can be flexible and it’s important to listen to and support you and each other.

I’m willing to make the final exam optional. That is: you can choose whether to do it (online, remote, take-home, open for 24 hours, limited-open-book, honour code, etc.) or not. If you decide not to do it—or if you don’t submit an exam on the day—then your final grade would be based on everything else in the course: tests, cahier, projects, savoir-vivre. That 60% would be reweighted to become 100% of your final grade.

Preamble over: here’s a survey asking you what you would prefer:
1. A compulsory final exam for everyone
OR
2. A choice, for each of you to make individually, of doing the final exam or not and reweighting the rest of your work
Survey link: [Qualtrics]
I’ll be collecting responses tomorrow (Thursday) 5:00 p.m. PST so as to email you, and instructors, with the results by 6:00 p.m.

I hope that this is good news. Any other questions, please email me!

Dr Juliet O’Brien