Students sit in precise rows. Feet anxiously bounce. Eyes hastily scan. Students hear the dreaded line: “Five more minutes.” Kids give their friends uneasy glances from across the classroom. Finally, the sound of the bell echoes a tone that allows a realization to set in for students: the exam is over.
As summer creeps nearer, students start feeling the overwhelming pressure of finals week. From June 7 to June 12, students at the high school endure the “final experience” for each of their classes over the four days.
Many years ago the high school aimed to help students manage stress by moving from final exams to final experiences. Although the change was supposed to symbolize the school’s focus on a student’s “experience” rather than a test, it seems the only real change made was the term students and teachers are supposed to call it. Students are still enduring the stress-inducing week, no matter if the name differs from other schools.
In some classes students are asked to present a Ted-talk on a topic of their choice, in other classes they are asked to write a three-paragraph essay on the year’s material.
Most commonly, when asked “How were finals?”, the typical student response is “I’m just glad it’s over.” What does this popular comment imply about the high school? Should students’ final days of the school year, spent with peers, friends, and staff, consist of an experience that is “gotten over with” rather than enjoyed?
The article “Why Finals Week Can Be Good for Students” from Psychology Today argues that finals are beneficial because they allow students to improve and practice valuable skills such as time management, stress management, and decision-making. Author Debra J. Cohen mentions another argument: “the ritual of finals reminds us that we are not alone”.
Cohan remembers, “We’d study there until the [library] closed at 2:45 a.m. and stumble home together, knowing that we’d be right back at it together the very next evening. Right below the surface of that hard work and exhaustion existed a durability of relationships undergirding it all.”
Yes, this difficult experience may bring a sense of community and force students to practice vital life skills. However, is there not a healthier way to approach the final exam, which would still bring a sense of community and allow students to test their skill sets?
A possible solution may be to lessen the weight of the final exam grade. At the high school, finals are worth twelve percent of a student’s year grade in a class. Two hours of one day do not reflect twelve percent of a student’s whole school year, so why do they dictate twelve percent of students’ final grades? Reducing the weight of the grade may help students focus more on the actual experience rather than the test grade.
Some point out that lowering the weight of the grade could create an issue: students won’t prepare ahead of time. However, one could argue that the studying which takes place before finals is somewhat pointless. Kids cram over eight months of material into three to seven days of studying and then forget the information almost directly after.
Finals are not beneficial for students’ learning because the preparation leading up to the exams is centered around memorization. Students’ final experience should be focused on learning impactful and meaningful material rather than memorization.
According to Indegene, “Within 1 hour, learners forget an average of fifty percent of the information presented; within 24 hours, they forget an average of seventy percent of new information; and within a week, they forget up to ninety percent of what they ‘learned’.”
“The Curve of Forgetting” graph, shown above, was found through the University of Waterloo’s experiment on memory. The black line represents the amount of information students remember thirty days after learning. Graph courtesy of the University of Waterloo.
So, it is irrelevant whether the added pressure is present or not, since it is just a matter of days before students forget the material they memorized.
Thinking about the system in a more general way: students are devoting well over five hours every day, for about a week, to a moment that will affect twelve percent of how they were assessed the past 180 days, just for the material to be completely forgotten. Seems fair, doesn’t it?