How Much Is Too Much? A Case Study On Finals

 It's Time For Some Controversy Baby!

Your professor furrows his brows and penetrates your skull with his glaring eyes, as the constant fluttering motion of papers are a series of butterflies cascading down on all sides, deceivingly entertaining you whilst simultaneously extracting all of your attention and focus from the task at hand. The clock, always seeming to be extending the day long past its standard 24 hours now seems to be speeding through time like it's been struck by an electric charge. Words, numbers, and symbols, all crawl out from your paper and coil around your head, with every drastic effort from your part to seize them and comprehend their inner mechanics falling just short, as they whirl past you and strike you dizzy until you’ve died. For the past 6 months, you’ve been biting your fingernails in anticipation of this one event, reminiscing of the time when it once finished, and eagerly awaiting the moment when it will finally dissipate like any other thing of the past. Yet now that you're here, it’s all too anticlimactic, and you beg and plead to hold on to the paper, to get one more grasp, change one more thing on the single strand of parchment paper that will ultimately be the root of your demise, yet its too little, too late. Your professor snatched it from your sweaty grips, and propelled your sagging, heaving corpse out of his class, and into the cold, rainy world of reality. A few gentle smiles of comfort are shot your way through the everlasting stumble home, but the overarching sentiment is clear; everyone flunked. Thus is the reality, twice a year for 4 long, arduous years of high school, for all students in this world. It is gazed upon as a burden, yet a necessary one, yet most pertinently, an unavoidable one. But who set these guidelines? Who made it so that this system of drudgery and stress was the right course of action for schools across the globe. Is this too much, or the perfect segment of preparation for alumni steepling on into life?

With finals around the corner, freshmen at University High School are contemplating similar matters, and widespread rumination is in the air. Student Cyril McCormick has a hot take on the subject.

“I feel as though they are a waste of time. Freshmen don’t need the added pressure of a final assessment on top of final tests of their units,” McCormick said.

Yet, it isn’t wholly up to the students about whether or not finals should take place. Head of the Math Department Eric Shulman bolsters drastically opposing ideas regarding the necessity of finals.

“Yes, they are appropriate. Teachers need a way of testing how much knowledge students have acquired at the end of a semester where we are about halfway through our school curriculum, and need to be able to cumulatively see student mastery over the course of half a year,” Shulman said.

With students and teachers pitted bulls against each other on this highly controversial issue, some sort of compromise must be attained. However, with such extreme opinions, the matter can’t simply boil down to removing or not removing. Student Ryan Kim, an opposer of Mr. Shulman, fosters a solution that has been raised by several other students as a possibility for terms of agreement.

“I have mixed feelings about finals. I feel like for teachers, they are a good way for them to assess us on what we’ve learnt, but they also give a lot of stress right before the holidays, so they might ruin the amount of fun we have during our multi-week break. Also, even though it could hurt our grades, it could also raise them and give us a chance to make up for past mistakes,” Kim said.

So at the end of the day, why does this all matter? After all, this long-lasting tradition has not ever hinted at its departure from our tertiary educational system. Yet with constant backlash from a multitude of different groups around the world, if a change needs to be made to the educational system, it's the small steps that can eventually bloom into greatness.

“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas CAN change the world”- Robin Williams.