The Teaching Professor has a short note about students cramming for exams. The article talks about how you should deal with students cramming for exams. It includes the correct answer: you shouldn't do anything accept maybe change your tests.
What is the purpose of a test? It is some way to evaluate what a student has mastered. If a student can "master" something by spending a couple of hours right before the exam, is it really worth mastering? The real problem is that many tests seem to focus on recall type information. These are (in my humble opinion) mostly pointless. What does it say about a student if they can memorize something for a short time? There was a study or article somewhere that said if you want to see if a student has really memorized something (which can be important for some cases), you would have to give unannounced tests.
In physics, we are sort of lucky. Our tests and evaluations by the very nature of physics is not recall type tests. It is very easy to make problems that require students to think. Of course just because they do well on the test does not mean they won't have conceptual difficulties. The best example of this is the use of the Force Concept Inventory. It was shown in several cases that even students that performed well on tests often did poorly on this conceptual inventory.
This all goes back to what college is and should be about. If it is just jumping through some hoops and doing some other silly things, what is the point?
