Finals time has come to wreak havoc on the students of Summit. Every teacher has a different way of doing finals, whether it’s a cumulative exam, a unit test, or a project, it varies from class to class.
Psychology teacher Gregory Gilbert explains that his AP Psychology class takes a test that cannot hurt their grade, only replace their lowest test score.
“We have a cumulative semester test that includes about the top ten big ideas from each unit that we covered. We do not do retakes throughout the semester on unit tests. We provide practice tests before we do our real unit tests. At the same time, there is this retake of all retakes at the end of the semester to where if a student does better on our cumulative semester test than their lowest unit test score, the cumulative semester test score will replace that lowest unit test score,” Gilbert said.
Gilbert also said that he doesn’t call this test a final, and he thinks that students look forward to his cumulative semester retake.
“Students like the idea of knowing that there is something at the end that matters and it can only improve or help their overall grade. A final has too much stress added to it, so we don’t call this a final, it’s a cumulative semester retake. Now, students actually look forward to and want to strive to do well since they know they have one last chance to do better than that one unit test that can be overdone with this last test,” Gilbert said.
Math department head, Jamie Robertson, said that some classes don’t have a cumulative exam because there is not enough time to teach the content.
“It depends on the class. Some classes will take a unit test and some classes will take a cumulative test, depending if there’s time,” Robertson said.
Being chair of the math department, Robertson teaches four math classes. Her Honors Geometry class will not be taking a cumulative exam and her geometry class will.
Robertson said that she thinks the freshmen in her Honors Geometry class won’t have a hard time adjusting to high school finals.
“I don’t think [they will struggle] because it’s not a cumulative exam and it’s just a chapter test and they’ll have plenty of time to prepare for the test,” Robertson said.
AP World History is taking their final exam before finals week. AP World History teacher, Jamie Manker said the class is taking their final early because it’s the midpoint of the course.
“Our course has to end early enough for the AP exam, which is in early May. That puts the midpoint of our calls early November instead of the end of December. So our final exam is the exact midpoint of the class, so it falls a couple of weeks before the formal final exam window,” Manker said.
Instead of taking a final in the two hour block, Mankers class will continue learning new content, Manker said.
“It’s a year long course so we actually just continue content [and] start the next unit. We’ll just be studying the next set of topics, so it will be traditional lessons that have been structured to fit in the time blocks with more content,” Manker said.
