With it being finals week, students are preparing for their end of the semester tests and projects. Finals week has been known to cause a lot of stress the older students get. The older a student gets, the harder classes become, which makes it challenging to study in a time-efficient manner.
The Echo Editorial Board believes that avoiding studying does not resolve the need to study for finals. By ignoring finals as a whole, it reduces the problem of over stressing and anxiety. However, ignoring the stress is only a temporary solution. Once the time comes to study, one beneficial way to study is organizing your work class by class to create a system that is time effective. Alongside this, one can make a list of tasks to complete by a certain time. This can add an element of entertainment for a person, because the brain will release dopamine after checking off a task from a list, which makes a person feel more motivated and energized.
The Board also believes that as opposed to taking a test, having a project as their final may be more beneficial for students. Projects can showcase what you remember from the year compared to a test, where one will just use their short term memory and not retain the knowledge. Projects give students the opportunity to look back, reflect and demonstrate what they have learned over the semester, and to refresh their brains on lost or forgotten information.
The Board thinks when students have other responsibilities in life such as work, taking care of siblings or extracurriculars they need to attend, they may find it difficult to find time to study. Because of this, students will have to find time to take breaks while managing the time they spend studying. The Board believes this can lead to someone staying up late to study or being too tired to study once they have a break from their other responsibilities. This leads to students not retaining as much information and performing worse on their finals.
The Editorial Board also believes there is not a benefit to having a final in their classes. Finals can make or break your grade, which creates a lot of added pressure on students to do well on their finals. This added pressure can overstimulate students and cause studying to be stressful, which leads to less information retained. With this being the case for several classes, the Board believes it can be challenging to remember information from an entire semester. Having to do this in seven different courses adds onto the challenge.
The Echo Editorial Board believes that instead of tests with answers, showing what you know through creativity such as a project would serve as a better representation of what students have learned throughout the semester.
