Throughout the first two quarters of the school year, students learn an immense amount of information in their classes. They are given quizzes and tests to make sure that they are truly understanding what they’re being taught. As the end of the semester gets close, students will stop learning new information and start reviewing for a much larger proof of comprehension: semester exams. They face study guides and review sessions with their teachers and classmates to prepare for these exams. Many students will study hard for these tests, hoping for a good grade in the near future. It’s students like this who dread the tests due to the amount of stress they put upon themselves. They wonder why the exam must be so stressful for them, especially because it’s just one assignment.
Many students may argue that they shouldn’t have to take a semester exam due to their average being high enough and the possibility that the exam may lower it. So, really, should exams be required for students with a high enough average? Some teachers agree with the students who feel that the exam is unnecessary if it will greatly affect their average in the class. One teacher provided us with this response to that exact question: “No. If it’s going to hurt the average, [the exam] puts a lot of stress and pressure on students to do well on one test when they have proven throughout the year that they know what they’re doing.” However, like every conversation, there were differing opinions. Another teacher made a great point by sharing, “Yes. The point of high school is to prepare you for college or a career. For most students of Brandon High School, the plan is to go to college, and in college, you’re going to have to take every exam.” Many people tend to forget that if a student plans to go to college, it doesn’t matter how well they’ve performed in the class or on the tests. They will still be forced to take the exam in the end. Simply said in three easy sentences to answer what many students wonder, “It’s good to prepare you to take a cumulative test over all of the material. To prepare you to know how to do that. That’s the point of exams.” It’s a good thing to know how to take a test like this because, based on what was stated previously, exams aren’t something students can escape if they go to college. If they take semester exams in high school, where there are no exemptions, they’ll be better prepared for what they’ll face in college. Another teacher built off the previous statements. “I feel like semester exams are a great way to demonstrate cumulative learning. However, if somebody has consistently achieved a high enough average, I don’t know if there is a reason to continue to retest. But, I also think semester exams are also a good life skill. You learn to manage your time. You learn to plan. I just think that is something that we should hold on to.” As seen in this quote, taking an exam is just a good skill for students to have. Students can show what they’ve learned by taking an assessment of everything from the past seventeen to eighteen weeks. Although this teacher did agree that they didn’t see the point in retesting over and over if the student’s average was high enough to show proficiency, they still went back to the point of taking this test being a good skill to have. Another teacher, who is pro semester exam, provided this quote. “[W]hat I know is that at some point everybody has to take some sort of high stakes assessment. And I feel like our students, especially the ones who are high achieving, who have really high averages, they get exempt from way too much stuff. And they basically go through high school only ever taking an ACT, it’s like the only high stakes, and maybe state tests. But I feel like other classes should also have some sort of high-stakes assessment…I like to make sure [my students] have a semester one exam so that they can practice studying for something and having a lot of consequence and weight on one single assignment.”
Another question is what are these exams actually doing to help? In what way are they causing a benefit? When they’re broken down, there are separate benefits for teachers and students. When thinking about how the exams may impact students, one teacher said, “I think it depends on the class. Something that’s very content-based, like a chemistry or a math-based class, I could see a benefit to it to show that you’ve watched the progression of ideas built on themselves.” If students are able to easily watch how each concept they’ve learned branches off the others, they’ll be able to connect ideas together more easily. Students will learn how to interconnect different concepts with others and easily recall that information in a way to benefit them. Comparing that idea to a standard test broadens the bigger picture that many students miss when exams come around. “[S]emester exams, they prepare you for college by giving you the experience of taking a cumulative exam. Which you don’t have otherwise. Otherwise, you’re studying unit one, you’re taking a unit one test. You’re studying unit two, you’re taking a unit two test. You’re studying unit three, you’re taking a unit three test…But you haven’t learned how to put it all together. And the cumulative exam is taking all of that information and making sure that you’ve absorbed it in a way that you can put all the information together.” For students, they’re able to take any information that they learned and study everything to make sure they understand it. If they do, they’ll score well on the exam. If they don’t, their grade will reflect their lack of understanding of the material. Now, what about teachers? What do these exams do for them? “For a teacher, it can show and reflect any gaps in instruction. ‘Is there a weak point in the overall scheme of the curriculum? Was there some point that students either didn’t retain or they weren’t able to apply it along with other concepts?’” Teachers are able to look at the scores and the breakdown of the exams and see where they may be falling short in their instruction. They’ll then be able to change their focus more towards a certain topic, along with their methods to teach said topic if they see it necessary. They’ll then be able to better prepare their future students for the exam based on how their current students’ scores seem. Looking back at the students and what they gain from taking these exams, the benefits are once again brought to light in a very similar manner. “I think the benefits of semester exams are helping you learn how to study, having to take a large amount of information that covers the entire semester, having to synthesize it down into a few topics that you deem important…It also helps you focus or it forces you to focus more, because you have to spend some sort of amount of time studying a small amount. Really focusing your attention on something. And there are consequences associated with it.” In the long run, there really is a benefit to semester exams. It may just be buried under the surface of stress many students dwell on.
A big thing that is emphasized is the grade portions of exams. Students will prepare for these exams to try and get a good grade. But what do these exam scores do for the teachers? “I guess they just give me an idea of where you stand overall…You might be taking an exam on units one, two, three, and four. And if everybody did poorly on unit two questions, then I know unit two is something we need to work on.” By taking these exams, teachers are able to see what parts of the curriculum they need to refocus on again to help their students improve. By improving in that area, not only will they help their student’s test scores, but they’ll also aid in their proficiency as an instructor. Furthermore, “If consistently students are missing questions that apply to unit two, then as a teacher I can look at that and say, ‘Ok, the students did not understand this information in unit two…’ And so it’s not only did they learn it? Were they able to build upon it?” Teachers are able to see where their students are below proficiency in the standards, and they’re able to go back and see why that might be. They’re also able to better understand if the students just didn’t understand it or learn it in a way that they were able to add upon their previous lessons that they’ve learned in that class. “Exam scores help you assess two things. One, where your students are at. What they need help on…And two, it helps you learn how you are doing as a teacher.” Teachers are able to see and grow upon their methods based on the performance of their students on the exam. They’re able to grow along with their students to make sure they’re doing whatever they need to do to allow them to succeed. “[Y]ou can compare your scores to previous years…I keep up with a spreadsheet of all my scores and I look and I’m like, ‘Ok, well these students understand unit two better this year than they did last year. What did I do differently? And whatever I did, maybe it’s working, and so maybe I need to do more of that.’ So it helps you inform your practice and helps you assess where your students are at.” Teachers will keep up with their data from previous years to see if the way that they’re changing their instruction is really benefiting their students in the way that they believed it would.
The last big question that is constantly asked is do semester exams actually help the students, or are they just more stressful than they’re worth? These exams cause a great amount of pressure on students to do well, so what’s really the point? “I think students who are going to college benefit from the practice of taking exams because there’s no exemption for exams in college courses. So just understanding that there’s going to be a high stakes, pressure, sort of situation at the end of those classes, I think that there’s a benefit to staying in that practice.” It really all depends on what a student wants to do once they graduate high school. For the students going down the college path, exams expose them to elements that they’ll continue to see, so really they’re helpful. “I don’t think [exams are] that much stress. I think that’s a little bit dramatic. People have been doing this since the dawn of education. I had to do it when I was in school, and it wasn’t that stressful. It’s not that stressful. You just have to study. It teaches you how to study too. Because really, how much are you studying for a unit exam?” Obviously, exams are something that’s been going on for years. They’re not just impacting our generation alone. Not only are they a tradition of sorts in the school system, but they’re also beneficial by allowing students to grow their skills of studying and retaining information. This will greatly help the students and make the stress that they are under worth the outcome that they get in the long run. Exams also give students other skills that will help them grow. “I think they are helpful. I think it goes back to that time management is a life skill. We have to learn to plan ahead and manage our time.” Time management is a skill that is greatly stressed upon students while they’re still in school because if they learn how to manage their time at a young age, that skill will follow them all throughout their lives. Exams just reinforce this idea of time management being important for people to be successful, no matter what they do. Moving back to the portion of these exams just being full of stress, people need to take into consideration the mental stability of these students. “There’s definitely an element of mental wellbeing that could be adversely affected because students stress about tests. But overall I think it’s still a positive thing because you need to learn to deal with that stress too. Like ACT’s a stressful thing. PSAT is a stressful thing. AP tests are stressful things. And so it helps you maybe better cope with that through exposure, so I would lean that it’s good overall.” Although the exams themselves may be stressful, by students taking them they’ll be able to be better adjusted to a stressful situation that they’re going to be put in. There will always be stressful tests that students are faced with and if they’re more experienced by taking these assessments, the stress factor of them will lower.
Overall, exams may be something that students stress over and put a great amount of pressure on themselves, but when all the data is collected and overviewed, there is actually a great amount of significance and importance to the assignments that students are taking. Exams aren’t just another grade in the grade book, a cumulative test that will provide students with the skills that they need to not only make it through high school but also get through whatever life has for them in the future. Once the big picture is completely put together, the importance of exams is actually something that benefits the students of Brandon High.
