I have taken many final exams and have also had to do final projects. Even though I do believe each of them have their strengths and weaknesses, overall, tests are far more productive than projects.
Tests require you to study all the material from the entire course. Oftentimes with projects you get to choose a certain section in the course to do your project on, which means you don’t have to apply any knowledge from any other section. This means, theoretically, you could not go to class all semester except for one week and really focus that one week. Then, when it comes time for the final project, you can just use the knowledge you learned from that one week to get a good grade. That is unfair to the rest of the students who have taken every week seriously. Tests make sure you know all the information from every chapter.
Also, tests take out the subjectivity in grading. There can be times where a student and teacher disagree on the grade they received for a project, but this would never happen for a test. You are either right or wrong. You either know it or you don’t. It eliminates controversy and there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Often times final projects are group-based, and this is a major problem. Everybody knows that in every group there are going to be one or two students who do all the work and one or two students who don’t do anything. Let’s look at a scenario. Student A doesn’t work hard, but he gets assigned a group with the smartest student in the class. Student B is a very hard worker, but he happens to get assigned a group of students who won’t help him do the project. Is it fair that student A will most likely get a better grade on the final just because he was assigned the better group? Tests allow the professor to evaluate each student individually without any other factors playing a role in their final grade.
In the end, some classes work better with tests while other work better with projects. However, I think more classes should work toward assigning final tests rather than projects because it makes the student study all the material throughout the entire semester, it takes the subjectivity out of grading and it doesn’t let any other factors affect final grades.