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My professors usually give solutions for part term tests. But it seems that, they never gave any solutions for the past final exams in any courses I've taken.

Does anyone has the same experience? Or does anyone know why it's like this? I personally believe that students could use past exam's answers to prepare for their own exams.

Edited: Wow, it's amazing that so many people shared their opinion here. I'd just like to clarify my question here cuz I see my question mislead few people, my apologize. Say, I am taking some course this year, and the professor would usually post some pasts term tests with answers and the past exams from previous years(with no answers, or sometimes they just post a link to the library website, where answer-free version of past exams can be found) on the course web-page.

This depends on the institution & department and potentially the instructor/course.

The last two institutions I have been at (UK) have provided solutions to past exams. One only odd numbered years, the other all years.

I'm sceptical about the value of providing solutions to past exams for studying purposes. From my experience the temptation to look at the solutions instead of struggling through the questions is often irresistible for students, especially those who are struggling. This leads to the false impression of knowing how to solve the problems. Of course past exam solutions can be used effectively to study, for example by only using the solutions to check answers after completing the entire exam as practice. But I have rarely seen students do this.

Developing appropriate exam questions is difficult so instructors may also want to recycle past questions and therefore not provide past exams (questions or answers).

Most professors do not like to give out the solutions to exams (and the exams by themselves) because they do not want students to create collections of past exam questions. This is for two reasons:

1. Some questions might be re-used later. This is not only laziness but
   there are usually a limited number of meaningful and unambiguous
   questions that can be asked.


2. Professors want to stop students form
   just learning past questions by heart and they want students to focus on the actual
   content.

They don ‘t give out those solutions as they use the questions in future exams.

If they handed out those solutions then that question bank is not longer useful.

Writing suitable questions to the correct level takes time.

They are well within their rights not to provide the solutions to those final exam questions. Those exam questions may not be officially available either.

They have provided practice questions with solutions for your benefit throughout the course.

Also, being able to solve questions without having a pre-prepared solution to refer to is a skill you need to develop.

There is a very prosaic answer that somehow hasn't been mentioned yet. The partial exam happens during the term, when the professor is dedicating a lot of time to teaching and wants to help their current students learn. The final exam happens at the end of the term, when the professor is done teaching and typically wants to spend time on something else.

I think this totally depends on the course or more importantly, the advisor. I've had courses where the final exams of previous years were discussed in the next years so that students learn from them.

As for why that can be the case, well, maybe the advisor intends to use similar questions and that's why they prefer not to reveal them (again, this comes from personal experience)