Final Exams

What is the objective of final exams?

My thoughts in the past have always been that it is a way for students to put together all the knowledge and skills they have been acquiring. It really forced students to go back and review what they had learned. So in the past I have always put a lot of emphasis on the final exam and made it 20% of the semester grade.

My one issue with final exams in the past has been that grades have always been due so quickly after the exam so that doing an authentic assessment is really out of the question (due to lack of time to correct it) and so my exams have traditionally been MC, T/F, fill in the blank, matching (no more than a word per answer). I've overcome that frustration slightly by adding an authentic part to it completed the week or two before hand and worth at least half of the final exam grade.

But today I sit here thinking about my Spanish I class. Over the weekend I had already started to put together a traditional exam using old ones as a guide. But when I gave students a chance today to look through their files and look through how much they had accomplished and reflect on it, I started to realize that with this group, they already had been putting it all together. And much of what they had learned throughout the year was still at their fingertips because they had retained so much. I realized that over the past months they had already demonstrated to me their ability to put it all together. One student even voiced my exact thoughts when she asked why we needed a final exam with all this proof of what they had accomplished.

So what is the point of the final exam now? Do I really need to give them a test that tells me exactly what I already know?