For many students, finals week is the most dreaded time in the school year. This is especially true now that a Missouri law mandates that school can start no sooner than ten days before the first Monday of September. This pushes finals back until after Winter Break to the week of January 10th. And while I am not the hugest fan of this new change, I don’t think finals as a whole are terrible. In fact, I think that as students we’re better off with them in our curriculum.

I used to be terrified of the way final exams are weighted, but I now think it’s one of the biggest reasons why final exams deserve their place in a high school curriculum. Without a big weighted test at the end, students would have no way to really reflect progressive improvement over the course of the semester. It’s the grand weight of a final that allows unsatisfied students to take a big last stand for their grade. Now some people are afraid the grade they get on the final exam will bring down their previous good grades, but generally speaking, people who have good grades are the safest when it comes to final exams. Think about what doing really well in a class looks like–completed assignments (that you can study from) and probably retaining a lot of the material. Both of these things set people up to be better at studying for finals.

Another unsung benefit of final exams is that when studying for them, students are forced to look at all the learning material they studied that semester together. This is especially important in subjects that build on previous material. For instance, somebody trying to understand basic right triangle trigonometry might struggle if they don’t remember how the hypotenuse works, but if they had to review the hypotenuse for a cumulative final exam, their understanding of the newer concept would be improved in a way it wouldn’t if they just had studied the newer concepts like most students do on a normal test.

But for some people, their fear of finals nowadays is less about the tests themselves and more about the timing. I am going to be honest. The new law that made finals week after Winter Break is incredibly hard to argue in favor of, so I am just not going to. Most students have other obligations over winter break and sometimes those obligations, such as travelling overseas to see their families, are not easy to do while studying. I only think it’s not all bad. Sometimes two extra weeks of no school can help people find time to properly study. For students that juggle work and extracurricular activities, or really anyone that needs more time to look over concepts, two extra weeks can mean the difference between feeling fully prepared when they sit down to take their final exam and feeling completely drained from a night of anxiety-stricken cramming. Also, being able to space out study sessions over Winter Break can invoke the spacing effect, which is the effect where more spaced out learning events result in better long-term retention. 

All in all, finals have an important role in high school education. They give students the chance to review previous material, show how they improved, and fight for a better grade. The only thing that can really suck about finals is that they’re now after Winter break, and that only sucks some of the time. At the end of the day, finals may be scary, but they deserve to be part of our lives as students.