It’s your last week of senior year. Just four more days and you never have to set foot on this campus as a high school student again. That is, if you pass your finals.
Your plans for after you graduate are pretty much set in stone: whether you’re attending college, travelling, joining the workforce or the military or navy, you probably know what you’re going to be doing after high school by now.
You’ve made summer plans to spend as much time with your friends and family as you possibly can before you have to leave. Your last few days as a high school senior are going to be great, and your last few weeks before you start a new chapter in your life are going to be even better.
Your graduation ceremony is on Saturday and you’ve just taken your last final. Your teachers are rushing to get all your final exams graded while you pack a bag for grad night. You spend the night playing laser tag and go-kart racing. But when you come home the next morning, you find that you’ve failed a couple finals so you don’t meet the 2.5 GPA requirement to walk the stage for graduation.
The summer you were so excited about, the next year you were so excited about, are gone. You have to call your relatives and tell them they wasted their money on their plane tickets because you’re not going to walk. The college you were planning on attending in the fall is going to rescind your acceptance. You can’t join the workforce or the military because you’re not going to be a high school graduate anymore. Not to mention, you’re going to have to face the humiliation of admitting to your friends and peers that you’re not going to be graduating with them because you failed two stupid assessments.
What are you going to do now? Take summer classes? Even that might not be enough to make up for your lost credits so you have no choice but to repeat senior year. Go through the drama of losing and making new friendships, applying for college, finding part-time jobs, and testing, again? No thanks. Going through that once is already enough.
Failing your final exams and repeating senior year doesn’t seem very likely, but it’s happened and it probably will happen again. There’s an easy solution to prevent that from happening: allow seniors to take their final exams a week earlier.
Allowing seniors to take their final exams a week earlier will benefit both students and teachers. Students will be able to find out if they’ve passed or failed earlier, and teachers aren’t pressured to get grades in as soon as humanly possible. Teachers essentially have one, maybe two, days to grade all their senior students’ exams and calculate student grades. Teachers will have more time to thoroughly grade final exams and calculate final grades with that extra week.
The extra week can also serve as an incentive to do well on finals. If a senior has passed their exams, then their last week of high school is going to be a breeze. They can truly enjoy their last week as a senior in high school. But if the senior has failed their exams, they will have that extra week to make it up. It would be beneficial to both students and teachers to allow seniors to take their final exams a week in advance.
