Semester finals are the best way for teachers to cap off the semester for a variety of reasons.

Although students may not enjoy spending long hours pouring over notes, these cumulative assessments are preparing students for the rest of their lives.

  Cumulative finals are commonplace in college, so it does not do any good for teachers to let their students off easy by deciding against a cumulative assessment during high school.

If students don’t have experience preparing for cumulative tests, they will not know how to prepare for finals if they pursue further education.

  Another main concern students may have is how finals will impact their final grade.

The semester final will impact your grade exactly the way you choose it to.

If students are truly motivated to get a high grade in a class they will spend appropriate amounts of time preparing for a test. The same preparations should go into studying for finals.

Those students who don’t are likely not deserving of the high marks they desire.

  Another benefit of cumulative semester finals is that they are a great tool for both teachers and students to evaluate whether the material is being learned, or temporarily memorized.

This long-term learning of a subject is valuable because classes often build on each other.

  Even though students may wish they did not have cumulative finals because of the amount of studying they require, these tests are ultimately for their own good.

Cumulative exams contain material that has previously been tested on, making finals useless.

According to American Psychology Association, for a student to learn a concept they should be doing harder problems, instead of doing similar ones.

On the final test students prepare for problems they have already been tested on. These problems are not any more advanced and are not stimulating students’ thoughts.

The tests are given in a two-day span, for which the student needs to cram in many material at once.

When students are trying to learn and remember so much in a short time, they are not going to think about the material, just try to memorize it.

Multiple tests within two days can cause high amounts of stress for students. According to Yale researcher Marc Brackett, school becomes harder when students’ brains have to deal with a lot of stress.

Teenagers already have high amounts of stress from homework and extracurricular activities.

Having a test that weighs so heavily on a student’s grade will just add to that.

Teachers should give assignments that are more comprehensive than memorization. It can be a project where the student can show their true knowledge and not just try to remember vocab words.

Teachers can truly know what the student has learned. When the student is working on a the project, they will have to process what they are talking about and not just memorizing words.