By Frank Pellino
Guest Writer
“Great, I can’t wait for finals week to nally start!” said no one ever.
That is the most accurate quote I have ever written. But what is it that is so bad about finals?
“We all have to do things we don’t want to.”
“It’s part of college so you should just suck it up.”
“Life isn’t supposed to be easy.”
It’s not that finals are too “hard” or that students simply don’t want to take the tests. It’s about all of the stress and pressure that comes with finals week and how that negatively affects us. Studying for 5-7 finals takes a lot of time and energy, and that’s if you don’t have any final papers to hand in, which only take up more time.
And student’s struggles are noticed. All the psychiatrist appointments, sleepless nights, and aderall addictions show up in the form of statistics that eventually land on professors/administrators desks just to be forgotten about as fast as chapters 7-20 were crammed into some poor bio major’s brain last Tuesday night.
But I’m here to take a stand. To say what every other student is thinking but won’t say for the fear of seeming scared or “lazy,” which is worse than paying $55 an hour to see a psychiatrist.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that finals should stop, unless that’s okay with all the professors at FDU. What I want to say is that finals week doesn’t have to be so stressful and hectic. Simple things like not making finals cumulative or assigning a presentation rather than a test can make all the difference. And before any professor reading this writes a very angry letter to the editor I understand that isn’t realistic for every class. Some subjects simply require more studying and have to have a test at the end of the course. And for classes like those there simply is no compromise (Apologies to all the students in those classes). But for all the other courses changes need to be made.
During the crazy time that is finals week students don’t just get a lot of work and stress, they also get worse grades. It’s so much harder to study for a big psychology exam when you also have to study for your law final… and your creative writing test… and your philosophy exam… the list goes on.
Somewhere in the course of human history someone decided that the best time to give students their biggest work load of the semester is at the most crucial time as well. Finals, for most classes, are the biggest part of one’s grade. So why is that when students are given the most work? It only leads to worse performance.
