Finals. Every year, from June 5th to 9th, Masters high school students stagger in from the sunny outdoors into the air-conditioned FC gym, sit down in uncomfortable squeaky chairs, get barked orders by their proctors and take a ninety minute long test which decides 20%-80% of their final grade in most of their given classes. Students spend the next few hours shaking their legs, tapping their pencils on the desks and maybe even running out of the room, crying. But, finally it’s over… until it’s not. Most underclassmen, and some upperclassman students repeat this testing process the next day, and the next, and the next, until summer officially comes at the end of the week, and school is finally out for the year. Although, a lot of juniors and seniors take either no finals, or very few.

But, for many other students, including myself, finals, and the weeks leading up to them come with significant anxiety, loss of motivation and worst of all, overwhelming and spirit-crushing stress. 

Finals are, for many students and for many reasons, a terrible way to demonstrate what’s been learned throughout the years. Finals often leave students no time to retain what we’ve learned throughout the year, students cram studying during the weeks, or week, if you’re a procrastinator like me, leading up to finals, just to forget everything studied as soon as the finals are over.

Ella Horowitz ‘26, said, “One of the stresses is using your time on tests correctly… time management skills. With projects, you have more time and more of the ability to showcase all of your skills.”

To make matters worse, at Masters, we only have one week of official review, which for me, and I’m sure many others, is so little time to go over every single thing we’ve learned throughout our school year; Since Masters also doesn’t do midterms, we have to remember a year’s worth of material, rather than just a semester’s worth. And when some students have also spent the entirety of April and May preparing for AP exams or doing their AmSearches and finally, even after all that, students are still learning new material in their math classes two weeks before finals begins, it’s just neverending stress.

Test anxiety is another factor; for some students, anxiety prevents them from performing well on their final exams. For me, no matter how much I study and prepare, be it two hours or 12 hours, it’s possible I could get up to that desk, and forget everything I studied: my mind just goes completely blank. Finals, especially for students like me, who just can’t take tests, finals are a terrible way of showing the material that they’ve learned throughout the year. Finals inaccurately tell my teachers what I took from their class, and ultimately reflect poorly on me as a student.

Even after all the reasons I’ve listed, there are still so many more that tell us why final tests just aren’t the right way to see if students have learned anything throughout the year, not to mention that  teachers probably don’t really want to spend the week after summer starts maniacally grading final papers to get grades on time anyways. 

So what’s the solution I’d offer? Many students would much rather do a final essay, presentation, or project in any of their classes than take a final test. 

Zara Suvanto ‘24 spoke on this, saying, “Personally, I’m not a good test taker, and with a final project, I get to go home and think about it without any pressure. Tests just really stress me out, especially with my dyslexia.”

Studies show that final projects help enhance problem solving, management, and creative thinking skills. Not to mention that the lack of stress will actually make students more likely to perform better on final projects and papers. 

They’re generally more appealing to students, and teachers and students alike have a lot more range and creativity which they can use when it comes to final projects. In ninth grade Spanish, we had to cook a dish from a Spanish speaking country. Not only was this fun for me, the teacher was also able to see me apply my skills in a real world way. In my opinion, that’s much more valuable than answering some grammar questions.

Horowitz agrees, saying, “Final projects show more of your strengths than a test, it shows your ability to research topics and write about different things that you might not be able to express on a test.’

For some classes, such as math or science, a final project is much harder to achieve, since they’re already built in test based curriculums. But in classes like history or language, a final project, or oral test may even be a better way than a final to demonstrate a students’ abilities.