WOODBURY — It’s almost the time of year we all dread: spending endless nights studying for the final exams for all of your classes when all you want to do is be done with school. It’s really the final straw for most students.
Finals are the silent killers of students’ GPAs. Needing to study for the whole year is so unreasonable and for all classes.
Who do I look like … Albert Einstein?
“I will say that having the whole year on one test can be very challenging for most students,” said Kathleen Yocis, a Nonnewaug chemistry teacher. “Allowing students to have a cheat sheet I think is very helpful, but still, a whole year on one test that is 10% of your grade is crazy.”
I didn’t realize “final exam” was short for “final chance to ruin everything.”
Some people just don’t do well with unit tests, and now we have to do one of the biggest tests all year — that covers the whole year.
Finals are important, but not 10%-of-your-grade important.
I want to see the teachers take a final eight times to see how draining it is so sit for that long in silence doing something no one wants to do.
“The school should have some classes do projects to show what we have learned throughout the year,” said Claudia Tabak, a Nonnewaug junior. “Doing a project can show what we learned and show our creativity, and it helps us as students make it through finals week.”
Finals, which will be June 9-13, are the academic version of Russian roulette: You spin the wheel, take the test, and hope that your brain won’t blank out on question 10. Because if that happens, the A you worked so hard for could spiral into a C faster than you could blink.
The thing about finals is that they pretend to measure your knowledge, but they really test you on your memorization from the past nine months.
Declan Curtin, the assistant principal at Nonnewaug, thinks that schools in America should be testing more because we have lower average test scores than many countries.
“We need to take more tests,” Curtin said.
But should we be comparing ourselves to other countries? They have their own systems with their own curricula.
At the end of the day, final exams are proof that the system cares more about pressure than progress.
This is the opinion of Keira Zupan, a junior reporter for the Chief Advocate.
