>single final exam selects for lucky people. Did you learn the right thing? Are you healthy and well rested on the day?

If it's a well-designed course it should be clear what the content of the exam will be. If not, it's the professor's fault. And barring rare emergencies being rested on the day is also generally a matter of preparation, not luck.

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viraptor 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It's clear what pool the content will be from. But it's impossible to check everything. Some people will get things they've practiced more, some the opposite. Unless you give out the full list of questions, there will be luck involved.

> barring rare emergencies

It doesn't have to be a rare emergency. Things happen, loud student parties happen, random bad nights happen.

	▲	KPGv2 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Some people will get things they've practiced more, some the opposite. Unless you give out the full list of questions, there will be luck involved. In the case of calculus as an example, there should be nothing from the class you didn't have time to practice sufficiently. A full academic year is more than enough time to learn integrals, derivatives, sequences, and series with the small collection of tricks for solving difficult problems (telescoping series, trig sub, etc.) There's a couple dozen rules you learn that are straightforward to apply, and for the times they aren't obvious, there's like a dozen total tricks (trig sub, etc.). I took these classes. I remember how most people just phoned in the entire thing and complained at the exam review sessions how hard everything was. It's the simplest of memorization.