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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.

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).

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.

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.

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)

In addition to some of the good reasons already given in other answers, here is another idea:

The instructor is trying to help current students improve in the course. Solutions to in-term tests can do this, especially if later course material builds on earlier, or if there is a cumulative final exam. However, the final exam is the end, and no further improvement in the course is possible.

It could be a lot of different factors. Trying to stop lawlerly debates. Reducing self study (it is competition). Re-use of questions. (This is not purely laziness or to restrict learning. I do agree that if you have learned all the expected questions you may have mastered the course. But in some cases questions may be reused for psychometric purposes, to compare instructors or classes. For instance the SATs reuse questions for this reason.)

Also, schools, courses will differ. So some may post the answers.

For what it is worth, I disagree with the idea to keep solutions secret for exams, homework, etc. If people can learn from drilling the materials, they should be allowed to. This is an area where things have actually become much more restrictive, less open than several decades ago when it was normal to post solutions after tests or have texts with answers to every single drill problem (not just the odds!) I have the discipline to decide how much effort to spend on problems before checking a solution (am a big boy).

In addition, I see tests as very high stakes practice but as a PART of the learning process. You learn preparing for the test, while doing the test, and afterwards reviewing it. So I think it makes little sense not to share the solutions. But obviously many academic gatekeepers disagree.