Finals are supposed to test our cumulative knowledge of a subject, not our ability to multi-task and navigate frantically through competing, enormous amounts of work. Toward the end of the semester, we are forced to deal with a stressful compilation of tests, projects, finals and, for some, SATs. But these anticipated burdens become exacerbated with the shortening of finals week, and more in-class finals. To make matters worse, teachers often abandon the designated test day schedule, resulting in the overlap of in-class finals. With so many tests to study for and projects to complete, it is difficult to focus sufficiently on one task. But this haphazard situation would be mitigated if in-class finals were scheduled to be more spread out in the last two weeks of the semester.

In 2006, finals week was lengthened from five days to six days, in hopes of preventing students from taking multiple finals on one day. But since then, the length of finals week has decreased to the four days required for Regents. The reasons for the decrease include scheduling problems, concerns about cheating and the difficulty of finding proctors. This has resulted in more in-class finals, and multiple finals given on the same day. Though in-class finals are intended to ease our burden of studying, they actually add to it when scheduled poorly.

In-class finals and standardized finals each have merits, but unless they are scheduled fairly, both students and teachers suffer. Many teachers feel that this shift to in-class finals allows the exams to be tailored to the material that each teacher has covered; it also provides more time for grading. From a student’s perspective, having a finals week provides a transition period between the semesters and allows us more time to study, without interfering with regular schoolwork. But this smooth transition is lost when in-class finals are given amidst the overload of work at the end of the semester and other in-class finals. In order to resolve this conflict, in-class finals should be administered only during the two week period before finals week and only on their department’s designated test day. This would reduce the stress and confusion that currently exist in the final stretch of the semester, while still providing a smooth transition into the next semester through finals week.

The point of finals is to ensure that we have learned the material taught to us over the entire semester. And while some students may prefer standardized finals and others, in-class finals, the end of the semester would be much less hectic if the scheduling of finals reflected a better balance. If finals were more generously spread out in the last few weeks of the semester, the workloads of teachers and students alike would be less stressful. Maybe with this change, we can finally get finals’ scheduling right.