Is it fair to offer students a last-minute extension to finish a test? A friend of mine who is a CS grad student at a US university took a class in which the students were given an extra hour on a two-hour exam. The trouble is that this offer was made in the last five minutes when the professor realized the students were not able to finish answering all questions.

I am personally against this kind of offerings because it feels like they do more harm than good and reflects poorly on the professor's planning. Students plan their approach to solving a test based on the available time and often speed up in the last hour or 45 minutes to complete as much as possible. This certainly degrades the quality of the answers. Now when there is a sudden offer of extra time, many students will be confused on how to make use of this time. Ultimately, it will come down to the students who have better time management skills rather than those who really know better answers.

So, the question is: Is the practice fair and if not what a student can do about it?
As I've mentioned elsewhere on this site, students often seem to think in terms of &quot;fairness&quot;, but upon sufficiently intense scrutiny the concept is so fuzzily defined that it may well be that the only &quot;fair&quot; grading scheme is to give all students the same grade...an outcome which would certainly be unacceptable to many students.  Moreover:

Ultimately, it will come down to the students who have better time management skills rather than those who really know better answers.

Any way of administrating a course favors students with certain incidental skills over others.  Giving a prearranged, timed exam favors students with sufficiently good time management skills over students with very poor ones.  And not only that, the students who live &quot;on-campus&quot; are advantaged over commuter students.  Students who have a watch can look at it, whereas others need to twist around in their seats to look at the clock in the back of the room [if there is one], and so forth.
Every seasoned instructor I know would agree that most exams test subject-unspecific study skills as well as &quot;real knowledge&quot;.  Not to be too much of a downer, but the idea that a student has a well-defined &quot;real knowledge&quot; is a convenient reification, something that modern academic culture must believe in approximately in order to function but which it is dangerous to take too seriously.
The real issue is to design the exam experience so as to test a reasonable set of skills, weighted in a reasonable way.  There is no universal way to do this: it is better to be as explicit as possible about what skill set you want your exams to test and look to see if they do what you wanted.
Anyway, a better question is: is this a good practice?  I think the answer is no, at least in many situations.  Here are two obvious issues:


An announcement which occurs five minutes before the end of an exam may come too late for students who have already left the exam.

Unless the cohort of students taking the exam has the identical academic schedule [this is prohibitively unlikely in many graduate programs at American universities], it is very unlikely that every student will actually be able to stay for the extra hour.



I would describe the above two issues as concerning &quot;fairness&quot;.  Any student who did not get the extra hour for either reason would have a very legitimate complaint.

I am personally against this kind of offerings because it feels like they do more harm than good and reflects poorly on the professor's planning.

I agree that it reflects poorly on the professor's planning.  Whether it will do more harm than good to the students' performance depends on the exam and the students.  I agree that many or most students would find the experience of learning that they have 50% more time at the very end of an exam stressful, and many would be resentful that they would have used their time differently had they known this information at the beginning of the exam.
In summary: unfair?  Yes, if certain things happen, otherwise maybe not.  A good practice?  No, I don't think so.  It sounds like a rather inexperienced / sloppy instructor to me, honestly.