Photo by Gurneer Sidhu

After three years of finals being nonexistent, they will be returning next week. Finals can be given in the form of multiple choice exams, essays, projects, presentations, etc.

By now, it is no secret that finals at LZHS have returned ever since COVID halted them three years ago. With a years-long hiatus, there will naturally be many changes in how finals are now going to look at LZHS.

One of the most striking changes that finals have undergone is that they now only weigh 10% of a student’s overall class grade, compared to the 20% they controlled before COVID. For many students, such as Katherine Pyasik, senior, this change has provided a sense of relief. She credits this feeling to the fact that “with college admissions, there is a big push towards grades.” With a performance on a singular test accounting for less of a student’s overall grade, she says there is more leeway for students, allowing them to decrease feelings of anxiety and stress over finals. Ultimately, this was the sought after effect LZHS educators and administrators had when amending this aspect of finals, according to John Walsh, LZHS principal, said.

“Yes, we think finals are important, but they’re not so important that they could drop your grade two letter grades. Let’s just say you absolutely bombed the final, the lowest your grade could go down is one letter grade. If it was worth 20%, your grade could go down two letter grades. We don’t want one test to impact your grade too much if you don’t do well on it because everybody has a bad day. We want [students] to get the experience, but we also don’t want to overwhelm [students] as well,” Walsh said. 

Pyasik’s experience in Multivariable Calculus reflects such sentiments. Compared to the finals in her other classes, she found the Multivariable Calculus midterm exam to be much more stressful, as it accounted for 40% of her grade. Beyond simply changing a final exam’s weight on a student’s overall class performance, the name of finals themselves also changed to “cumulative experiences.” There were a variety of reasons that went into play for amending the term for finals, but the most pertinent reason was that it helped change the framing of how finals are viewed. 

“[Administrators and I] were having these conversations [regarding] finals and it was hard to have this conversation because I talked to someone older than I was. They’re thinking multiple choice [questions], but when I think finals I don’t necessarily think multiple choice [questions]. I don’t want people to think of it as multiple choice. I want them to think that it could be a paper, it could be a presentation, or it could be an essay along with multiple choice [questions]. What I’m really looking for is doing what works best for each class,” Walsh said.

Walsh’s reasoning for changing the name in order to reframe perceptions surrounding finals is that it forces a final exam to mold to fit the class subject better, becoming more beneficial for a student to experience.

“I don’t think [confining every subject to multiple choice tests] is real life. If you’re a graphic design artist, no one is sitting you down to do a multiple choice test right? If you are going to do welding, more than likely, you’re not taking a multiple choice exam to be a welder,” Walsh said. “However, if you want to be a nurse, you are taking a really comprehensive exam that’s multiple choice. If you want to be a teacher, [there] are multiple choice [exams] that are basically asking you to show everything you know about education. There are [fields] where you have to be able to just know [information] off the top of your head. Not all subject areas are like that.”