OP-ED: Our finals system is inefficient, inadequate and injurious

By: Tatiana Tripp

Posted: 5/20/08

I can only imagine what the graduating seniors went through these past few weeks knowing that their degrees depended on their doing well and completing everything earlier than the rest of their classmates. But finals period is stressful no matter what your class standing is. The important question to be asking is why finals period should be so lethal-what is it about finals that is so inherently stressful for students?

Stress really is a problem. We hear again and again that stress can be a dangerous thing. It's associated with a good many health problems, both immediate and with respect to the future. For instance, the increased adrenaline that is produced during stressful situations can become addictive, and without it, it's not unusual for depression set in.

Common side effects of stress include a weakened immune system, problems with the heart and arteries, increased production of stomach acid and other generalized health problems. It's by and large understood that too much stress should be avoided, and it seems to me that a week or more of finals and paper-writing and constant cramming can be too much.

If you read the literature, it will tell you that the keys to busting stress during finals are all about studying earlier, getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising and the like. I even received an e-mail before finals about free massages in the Shapiro Campus Center to help deal with the stress. These things, while helpful, I'm sure, don't seem to actually fix anything. Finals, as they are set up now, cause undue stress, which causes serious health problems. Therefore, the current finals system of concentrated deadlines is hazardous to students' health and overall well-being.

Finals, as we all know, include exams, papers and projects. These all have a certain due date. Depending on how understanding your professors are, this due date may or may not be a flexible one. Exams are scheduled for a set time and day, and unless you have a major emergency, it's difficult to reschedule these tests. Each exam period is a three-hour block of time in which the students in the class try to prove, on paper or verbally, that they learned what they should have learned.

This, in my opinion, is one of the worst ways finals can be conducted. This structure of final exams, papers and projects that are due by a specific date is bound to be stressful to a majority of students.

Not only are finals stressful, they also often seem to be an awful indicator of learning and knowledge. Cramming for a final may be as efficient for one test-taker as actually learning and studying the material throughout the semester for another. Similarly, some students can easily write the multitude of long papers that are piled on them without ever having to know much of anything pertaining to the assignment or even the class.

Not only are large final papers a waste of time for the student who is able to churn out papers quickly without studying the material, they are also a waste of time for the professors and teaching assistants who have to sit around grading paper after paper until, I'm sure, they start to feel like they'd happily scratch their eyes out.

While it's easy to criticize the system, writing about how it's fairly useless and unduly stressful, it's a bit harder to find a real solution that works. I doubt that students would be happy if, after a semester of diligent studying and restudying, they did not get to demonstrate the application of all their new skills.

I just don't believe that a final exam or paper is a pertinent demonstration of all this learning. My suggestion is a one-on-one discussion of the coursework with the professor or TA?for the amount of time it would have otherwise taken to grade a paper or exam. However easy it may be for some people to make their work sound persuasive on paper without ever really having to know what they're talking about, it is a lot harder to conjure up that same persuasive character in an in-person discussion.

Grades-for which I have separate criticisms-would be given in a holistic sense rather than having to do with percentages and assignments. Hopefully, this would lessen the stress of a final assignment that may comprise half of a student's grade. This said, I am optimistic that by the time this article is published, I will finally be finished with my papers and feel much less frustrated with the whole finals system-until next year.

The writer is a member of the Class of 2010.