Final exam time can be extremely stressful for students, but several professors are attempting to make it an enjoyable experience.

Bill Boon, professor of landscape architecture, teaches Design Studies 129 (Introduction to Creativity).

Instead of giving his class an essay exam as many professors do, he took them to perform skits at children’s centers.

“I used to give a written test in [the class], but it seemed out of place in a class on creativity,” he said.

Boon said he tried to focus throughout the semester on “lightening up and using humor in the classroom.”

“[For] our midterm, [the students] had to come up with an unusual dance that had to be performed by everyone in the class,” he said. “If they had music, they had to perform [the music] themselves.”

For the final, the class improvised skits revolving around a single topic.

“This year, since it was in December, their topics had to do with Santa Claus,” he said. “So they’d have topics like, ‘I dreamed of a Santa Claus at Sesame Street,’ ‘I dreamed of a Santa Claus at King Arthur’s Court.'”

Students seemed to enjoy the creative classwork, Boon said, but it could be difficult on the instructors of the classes they had after Design Studies 129.

“I’m not sure how teachers control them the rest of the day,” he said. “They get pretty fired up.”

Rebecca Burke, instructor of English, currently is teaching English 307 (Writing Young Adult Fiction).

For the final exam, she plans to give her students an essay question they can take home and work on for a week.

“I think students do a better job when they’re writing an essay when they have more time,” she said. “Obviously, it’s going to be better if you take it home and polish it.”

Burke said she has given in-class final exams in previous years.

“I did [take-home finals] for the first time last year, and it was the same question I always use in creative writing classes: ‘What makes good writing?’ And the differences between take homes and what students did in class was very distinct,” she said.

Burke said the students who wrote their final essays at home were able to be more creative.

Kris Fresonke, assistant professor of English, taught English 260 (Introduction to Literary Study), last semester.

For her final, she gave students a choice of two questions. The first was an essay question. The second was a little more unusual.

“It was to compose a play using characters [from books] we had read using the topic ‘Masters and Slaves,'” she said. “I like to offer students a creative alternative in case the essay exam has proved too easy for them.”

The question involving writing a play was the more popular of the two, she said.

“The majority of students chose that question, and the answers I got on that question were much more fun to read,” she said.