Should schools get rid of finals?
Every year students that are in middle and high school are required to take finals towards the end of the year. For that reason is why people call it “finals week” Just like the name, they are given for a week, and it’s the most stressful part of the school year. No matter how passionate you are about school, many students and even teachers question if these exams should even be required.
As a sophomore writing this, the last time I took “finals” was my eighth grade year, and you may ask why… well, it’s because my school didn’t require us to take finals during the pandemic, but right now I’m in my sophomore year and I have taken one final already, but I have more until June 10. Various students wondered why the school’s made us take finals even this year because we all thought they would give us another chance to not take them, but they didn’t.
Without the pandemic, I still question why these finals are required. We all know that they are there to test our knowledge from the subject, that we were supposed to understand throughout the year. But in reality, most students don’t “learn” but instead students memorize the information given to them. A majority of the time, once students finish the exams they forget the information and move on to the next exam, but isn’t the whole purpose of school to learn the information that’s provided to us?
These exams don’t teach the students anything, but instead, they give us stress. Too many students lose sleep just to perform well when in all honest schools should just rid of these exams because all were focusing on is passing and not learning the material. Besides the final exams, other students have to take AP or IB exams, plus all the homework that teachers give students can’t have peace during the end of the year. For example, my school in Virginia makes us take SOLs, AP/IB exams, and finals all during the last three months of school. As someone who has experienced it, these standardized exams have caused so much stress on me and others.
Lastly, final exams are 100% unfair. If a student has an A/B during the whole year, a teacher is expected that they do well on the final, because throughout the year their grades reflected how much they understood the topic. This is very true for driven students and those who are motivated to do well. But how about the students who are struggling and don’t understand the topic no matter how much you explain it to them? Students who have shown they weren’t doing well the whole year due to personal reasons or just lack of motivation have even more stress put on them because these finals tend to affect their grades the most. The teachers should know how the students are doing in their class, so there’s no point in final exams because throughout the year students have shown what they were able to do, no matter if they did well or bad. Most importantly, these tests don’t show how intellectual a person is, because there are students who are super smart but can’t do well on exams because of the pressure, and these exams, are just setting up students up for failure in the future because all students know how to do is take an exam.
