Finals Week at IHS

Indiana Area Senior High School

By ADDISON MOSCO

On the week of May 23rd, 2022 Finals Week at IHS will take place. Due to state testing, there was a tentative schedule to have finals during the week of May 9th. That made it hard for teachers to make their plans for the rest of the year, because the final is when students are supposed to retain information they learned throughout the year. When they still have more information to learn after the finals, teachers have to edit their finals, so students can pass them.

Many students were worried about the testing in early May. When they changed it students and teachers both were relieved. Junior Maycie Lorelli comments, “ I think having finals at the end of May will less interfere with AP testing and give students more time to understand the material. Teachers have been doing a lot of helpful reviews to help us remember what we learned throughout the year.”

Another student says, “Students’ success on finals has much to do with the amount of time they have to review material from the year in the week or two before they are to take the final. This fact should be considered when scheduling finals, as there are certain weeks in May when many students’ study time is consumed with preparing for AP or Keystone exams. The farther away from these other tests we can schedule our class finals, the better, as it allows students to focus on one exam at a time and do their best work to most accurately reflect their knowledge and preparedness. Many of my teachers have not discussed this yet, but I expect there will be review opportunities such as class review days, study guides, or other shared review materials provided to encourage students to review for the final.”

Students have mixed opinions about if finals are important or not. While they show the teachers if the students understood the material and learn what they were supposed to learn, many students think that if you demonstrate good testing scores and A’s on assignments, finals don’t really matter that much.

Maycie Lorelli states, “ I think if you demonstrate all A’s throughout the school year, they should be irrelevant because it’s extremely hard to recall things from the first week of school. I think it is important to pass finals, to an extent. If a student gets all A’s I don’t think it should matter.”

Some students think it is very important to pass finals and others do not. It depends on the mindset of the student and how failing a final will affect their grade.

A student exclaims, “ I personally feel that students should prepare enough to pass their finals and, while the end score may not matter so much, could use their results as a benchmark for what areas they showed growth in and what subjects they’ve mastered the most throughout the year as well as where their retention or practice wasn’t as thorough. This could be a good opportunity for self-assessment and reflection on where we’re at academically and what level of preparation we’re going into the next year with. I know, however, that many students don’t view finals through this lens, and so they turn into just another test to take and an added thing to stress about at the end of the year while yielding little fruit for the student on a personal level. Yes, I think students should at least be able to pass finals in order to demonstrate to themselves and their teachers that they have grown in a subject area and will be taking information from the course with them into the future. However, students can only do so much to review and prepare themselves for the exam; teachers must remember to craft finals in a way that will elicit fair and accurate measures of what they have prepared their students to know and what ways they have hoped to help their students grow throughout the course. Finals should not be made out to be an extra stress for students but an ending measure of their work in the class.”

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