For many schools, final exams are coming up very soon, and for Glenbard South, they are a little more than a month away. When students hear the word “finals,”they become fearful, have anxiety or start freaking out about their grades. In the current school system, final exams are made out to be the a final test to measure what one has learned from the previous semester, but are final exams beneficial, or even efficient at measuring the amount of content someone has learned.

Many people think that final exams are a good way to measure the information taught in a course and how much is learned and remembered. Yet, considering the format of final exams, many students become nervous and scared for their exams which cause their scores to drop. Also, Dr.Bruce Johnson stated that educators discovered that a lot of the information that students memorize will be forgotten after the test. So clearly many factors change one’s exam scores, thus not making it an accurate tool for measuring learning.

While final exams clearly do not efficiently show how much a student has learned, the question is are they beneficial to the actual learning process? Many skeptics say final exams are needed to prepare a student for college or the real world. In the real world knowing how to study and take a multiple choice exam will not help one because there are no professions that come to mind that require people to take multiple choice exams for long periods of time. Yes, knowing how to study and succeed for a final exam in college is good thing to know, yet it has nothing to do with being prepared for the many challenges of college which are time management, social problems, and choosing a major.

Also, the manner in which schools give final exams is very stressful for students. Students have four or five tests in different classes in the same week. It can cause stress for the students and does not allow the to be tested to their fullest capabilities in all areas. A series of shorter and more spread-out tests would be a much more effective way to measure a student’s capabilities because if the material from a whole semester is on one test students will cram.

So are finals beneficial? No. All they do is stress out the students, and they do not even measure how much the student has learned in a fair way. While there are no other options, final exams clearly do not benefit the student.