As the end of the school year nears, work has started to pile up across my classes. This is due to all the units concluding at the same time. On top of all of that, I am also supposed to find time to study for finals. I believe that while final exams do prepare students for college where final exams are frequently used, they are a stressful and inconvenient way to test a student’s understanding of material.
I’m not the only one who feels this way. According to a study by Frontiers in Education, a leading cause of stress for students is the pressure to perform well on exams. This, along with the already substantial workload placed upon students near the end of the year, is very demanding and stressful.
Along with the overwhelming workload, JDS also encourages students to participate in extracurricular activities such as sports and clubs. Clubs and extracurriculars often meet after school, significantly decreasing the amount of time students have to study and finish their work.
Even though we are supposed to be finished learning material in advance, students are also often still being taught new topics for finals just two weeks before the exams, sometimes even through the last week of school. This forces students to rush studying newer topics in order to make sure that they understand the new material they have just been exposed to.
A common complaint about the format of finals is that they prioritize memorizing material, like remembering dates, formulas or definitions, over applying or analyzing information.
In a previous pro/con on the Lions Tale about finals, Maya Preuss said that she retained the information that she had studied for finals for only a few days after she took her exams. This is most likely due to the unnatural process of studying for finals, which makes students study large amounts of content for four different subjects in a rather short period of time.
If finals are really about understanding rather than memorizing material, then it makes little sense for the school to force students to display understanding within the limited timeframe provided by the exam. Something like a final project rather than a test could allow students to really flesh out their ideas and thoughts on the subject over a period of time, rather than cramming all of their knowledge into one two hour period.
A final project would also fit in much better with many secondary classes that already give final projects and would significantly decrease student stress towards studying for the large exams. One might think this would be more stressful, but in reality this would be a lot easier to manage since everyone would have class time to work on their respective projects. This would also ward off any arguments that finals are exclusively tests of memorization, since a project would allow students to access their notes and previous assignments to display their knowledge.
If not a final project, a midterm could also serve as a suitable solution. Midterms could be beneficial to high school students since, unlike finals, midterms would give students the chance to improve their grades throughout the rest of the year in the event that they do poorly on the exam. However, a midterm would still require students to show their knowledge within a two hour period, so a project would be more ideal.
Overall, due to the unnecessary stress caused by finals and the inconvenient format of the exams, a project or midterm as a replacement could be greatly beneficial towards students’ mental health and grades, and would be a welcome change to the somewhat exhausted system in use currently.
