Making calculus relevant: final exam in the time of COVID-19

Abstract

Despite shifting to emergency remote teaching, a teacher's role and responsibility was to keep teaching their course to the same high academic standards as before COVID-19 upended our community. Meeting this challenge, without being able to use many well-established teaching practices, was also an unwanted opportunity to learn and experiment with new teaching technologies, techniques, and approaches. This note describes one such opportunity in mathematics: to design a final examination in a differential calculus course based on the connection between the course material and current events.