Finals Should Be Semester-Based

While the arrival of May clears the way out of a mountain of textbooks and offers a glimpse of the summer, it also slaps students in the path of an approaching nightmare: finals.

Although cumulative finals that cover an entire year’s worth of material make effective cumulative reviews, they are illogical and unnecessary in comparison to semester-based finals. Because end-of-the-year finals come almost directly after AP exams, students rarely have time to study for both.

This leads to an imbalance in prioritization, and the last few days before finals are usually the only time students can allocate to studying.

On top of the shortage of time in comparison to first semester, students are pressed to study for two semesters’ worth of material instead of just one.

Physics Honors teacher Karen Davis said her decision to choose a semester-based final instead of a cumulative final resulted from the “significant load of information covered in both semesters.”

While students are spending time re-establishing what they’ve both learned and been tested on before, they could be more thoroughly reviewing the material only recently covered second semester. This creates a disproportion between the depth and clarity with which students understand the material learned first and second semester.

But instead of cramming into their heads what they already know, students should be able to use end-of-the-year finals as an opportunity to fully review new material.

“We’ve already proven our knowledge of first semester material from the previous final,” sophomore Kelvin Lu said. “There’s no point to [cumulative finals] as they only add more stress.”

Moreover, second semester coursework often builds on first semester coursework. In those cases, it would be redundant to require students to be tested on both, since their knowledge of second semester coursework should be highly dependent on and integrated with their ability to process and understand first semester material.

“Granted, the things we do in second semester are definitely related to first semester,” Davis said. “There are points that come up over and over again, so it’s not like the students can forget everything they’ve learned in first semester.”

In addition, semester finals allow teachers the opportunity to be specific. This allows students to focus on major points that they should be able to fully understand. On the other hand, cumulative finals limit the depth of the material tested due to time constraints.

“Specific questions let us focus on certain points and maximize our reviewing, while broad questions are confusing to answer and study for,” freshman Michael Yen said.

Between balancing other tests, sports, relationships, extracurricular classes, family life, peer pressure and stress, such an expectation is nothing short of unreasonable.

“It would be too much to have a whole cumulative final, even though there are definitely things in second semester that differ from first semester,” Davis said. “I try to keep in mind that my students have a lot of other things to study for, and there’s a limit to how much information the human brain can hold.”