I am so glad that the school year is over, but the one bad thing about the end of the school year is finals. I understand that they have to make sure that we have retained all of the information we have learned over the past year, but at the same time I don’t completely believe that every single kid has to take finals. At our school, when you are a senior if you have at least an A- in a class, you do not have to take finals. I think that it should be that way for every grade if you have at least an A-.
The reason I think this is that I know many people in my school who are very intelligent, but do not test well when they are nervous. I sometimes fall into that group of people, as well. If you have at least an A- it is obvious that you understand the information that was taught to you throughout the year, and I do not think you should have to take a final to prove even more that you understand the topics in question. Plus, if you fall into the category I mentioned above, your doing poorly on your final could actually hurt your grade.
From what the teachers say your final is supposed to help your grade, but what happens when you do poorly? Your grade goes down. Plus you can’t retake a final!
As of right now I have about a week or two till finals and I will be cramming for the next few weeks. It isn’t that I do not know the information I learned over the year, I have A minuses, at least, in almost all of my classes. It is that it is on the whole school year of data.
The other thing I think should change about finals is that they should be more like midterms. At my school your finals are on everything you learned that school year, but midterms are only on the information from the first half of the year. I feel like if finals were only on the information that we learned in the second half of the year a lot of kids would do much better.
Maybe it is just me, but I feel as if we took on these policies for midterms and finals we would get much better results. And that’s really all the schools are looking for, right?
So that’s my take on finals, what’s yours?