How Important Should Finals Be?

High school students know all too well how conflicting December can be.  Even though it means a two week break, holiday season and spending time with friends and family, it also means finals. Any student you ask will tell you how terrible finals are, but are they really worth stressing out over?Your final exam can differ greatly depending on the class and teacher. For example, in foreign language classes, the final is administered both during the designated period and the week before. Depending on how much material there is to cover, teachers can count assignments even a month before the end of the semester as the final. Some teachers also choose to give the last test or essay of the year as the final exam. Besides the final itself varying wildly among different teachers, the grade and importance too. Most teachers that use a structured grading system mark the final as 10-25 percent of the overall grade. The biggest problem with this system is that doing badly on a final exam can ruin the grade a student has worked for all semester. The final can also sometimes only count as an important test. If the system is this unorganized, is it really worth it?When most students think about finals, they think of stress. The stress of cramming everything you’ve learned for almost five months into your brain just to take a two-hour long test. Should you sacrifice your social life to start studying weeks in advance? Should you just cram everything the weekend before finals week and hope for the best? Should you just say screw it and not study at all? Between the amount of information, short time frame and the fact students are often still learning new lessons while studying for finals, it can be a very difficult and incredibly stressful experience.The biggest reason that students get stressed is because it can be such a big part of their grade. Why does it have to be? If the final exam is just the teacher’s way of determining whether the class has learned the material, then it shouldn’t be an incredibly stressful event.  When students are stressed by the amount of information, they doubt their knowledge of it and can perform worse than if it were just a regular, longer test. Students should be able to take it without worrying about losing the grade. They should get time after they take it to make sure their final grade is all that it can be, with the final included. The entire concept of final exams, both midterms and spring finals create an atmosphere of stress and fear in the student body, rather than providing teachers with an accurate representation of what students have learned. So there’s only one question left; what can we do to change it? We can speak up, express our objections, and thereby help make finals a better experience for all students.