Final exams have not been administered at LZHS since the beginning of COVID. This year, however, finals are coming back, albeit under a new name: ‘Cumulative Experiences.’

“During COVID, [LZHS] stopped [giving] final exams, and we had some feedback from students that had graduated that [said] it might be worthwhile to revisit it, because in order to best prepare [students] for life after high school, it would be a good thing to have some experience with [finals],” Zachary Gimm, Interim Assistant Principal of Academics, Innovation, and Assessment, said.

Cumulative Experiences will be similar to final exams in that they will represent 10% of a student’s summative grade and will serve as an “opportunity for students to synthesize the learning they have done over the course of the term,” according to Gimm. Unlike finals, however, the way they are administered will differ from course to course, unlike finals, which were traditional exams.

“We realized that teachers in the building offer rich opportunities to demonstrate cumulative learning [that were not] just a hundred-question final exam,” Gimm said. “We wanted to represent the breadth of opportunity that teachers offer students to demonstrate their learning and not default to the traditional expression of a final exam.”

Cumulative Experiences could still be administered as exams, but could also be taken in other forms like presentations or group projects.

“We wanted to give teachers [that] flexibility and kind of honor the work they’ve done to allow students to give presentations or create a project or all the different variety of methods and modalities,” Gimm said. “So really, it’s a small shift in language, but we hope it represents the real opportunities that teachers give students.”