Finals week… or my final week?

Finals week might be the most stressful period of time of a high schoolers career. From pulling all nighters to study to spending countless hours in the library. Is this stress worth it and should finals really be the deciding factor of how much you learned this year and how well you do in the class?

Art by Kayman Mangan

At Samo, the baseline is that finals are worth 20% of your grade. This puts an enormous amount of pressure on students at the end of the semester to recall everything they have learned over the past four and a half months from up to seven different classes. Studying for these tests can be highly demanding as organizing everything - tests, quizzes and assignments - from the past 80 days or so, is scary. Trying to cram and make sure you remember everything for one test that practically determines your grade in the class is unrealistic. Especially if the class is an Honors or AP, which means the material is more in-depth and usually covers more units throughout the semester than a non-AP or Honors. Michal Kalinowski, a physics and chemistry teacher here at Samo, says that he does not believe in finals.

“I feel that the unit exams have enough information... I believe that it’s enough for me to gauge an accurate grade for the students, ” Kalinowski said.

Finals weigh heavily not only on students’ grades, but their mental health. November and December are some of the peak months for seasonal depression, and for many, the added stress of finals only exacerbates these feelings. Students also experience stress due to sleep deprivation, a common byproduct of last-minute studying. Insufficient sleep can lead to spiraling and negative thoughts, which can leave lasting impacts on student’s mental health and even affect their ability to perform well on the exams themselves. Veronika Brandt (’26) reflects on her mentality approaching finals week.

“It’s really just not worth the mental toll it takes... It’s also not just the stress of finals week itself but also the weeks leading up to it,” Brandt said. “So many teachers continue to assign work and introduce new topics even the week before exams, so you have to deal with learning this new material while there’s practically no time to study.”

Although finals seem unbearable, many teachers feel that they can justify finals being such a large part of grades. Things like the minimum F policy (which allows all assignments to be graded at least 50 percent, even if the student didn’t fully finish it) and test retakes give students the opportunity to raise their grades throughout the semester. Finals can also help students prove that they actually learned and understood the material if they haven’t been able to prove that earlier with tests and homework.

Despite the numerous forms of grade inflation, these dominant tests simply put too much pressure on students to recall everything they learned and compile it into one exam. At the end of the day, is it really worth it to continue assigning finals if it means piling unnecessary stress on students?