It’s that time of year again. Time to take all the things your teachers taught you or tried to teach you from the beginning of the semester to the test. The knowledge you gained or lost will now be compiled into a test and that test will decide your future. The seniors who don’t pass their finals won’t graduate, and the students who don’t pass will now be a semester behind in that class(es).

Are finals really necessary though? What do finals do besides stress students and teachers? During finals, some teachers don’t show up. Students are forced to try and remember things their teacher has attempted to teach them from the beginning of the semester and it’s not even for one class; it’s for 7 classes. Finals can take a student who has an A and if they fail it they could fail the class. How does that work? How does an A student fail finals? The stress and anxiety could cause them to panic and completely forget what they were supposed to have learned.

 Students are more focused on passing the test and not learning the material. That completely defeats the purpose of school. The purpose of school is to understand and expand your knowledge on the subjects. This single test can make or break a grade. It doesn’t help that near the end of the school year students have to take AP exams and finals. That’s so much more studying and pressure that students are in. These tests don’t let students show their full understanding and knowledge.

By the time the final grades are sent to parents and guardians it’s summer. Students can just look at their final grade and move on. There’s nothing they can do about it. One of the best ways to learn is from your mistakes and how are students supposed to do that if they can’t look at their final and see what they did wrong? What’s the point of finals if we can’t even learn from them?

Throughout the entire year, students have to take a series of unit tests, state tests and so much more. That means that students progress is being tracked through tests for the whole school year. Taking a cumulative exam at the end of the year doesn’t really tell the teacher anything that they don’t already know about the students’ abilities. If someone has been getting an A the entire year, haven’t they proven that they understand the material?

Finals are just putting students and teachers under lots of unneeded pressure. There’s actually no point in finals, so why do we need to take them? Why do teachers have to put them together? Why are we still needed to do something that is so unnecessary and not at all helpful?