ARE FINAL EXAM NECESSARY
I have news for many of you who have yet to live and work in the real world: rarely in your life will success at any endeavor come down to one event.

The real world is getting up every day, going to work at whatever it is you do, making mistakes and learning from them while trying to get better with experience.
Although most of you have been conditioned through supposed “make or break you” tests like the SAT and ACT to believe that the culmination of your learning can be gauged by one score on one test taken one particular day, this is a lie.

The truth is, that is a ridiculous measurement of successful learning.
The way our system is set up is fundamentally flawed.

Ending high school with the SAT or ACT, finishing each college semester with a round of heavily weighted tests and basing entrance to graduate schools on standardized test scores like the LSAT, MCAT and GRE does nothing but teach students that attendance and regular work are optional as long as they manage to save themselves with a good midterm and final test grade.
This is a bad lesson to teach students because this is not the way the real world works.

The classes that allow for you to do this are not helping you at all.
By procrastinating all semester long and expecting some miracle to happen where you will suddenly learn everything from the last four months you are not helping yourself at all.
Some classes don’t weight or even require a final, they base the grading on quizzes and projects that require group work or at least a substantial amount of individual research outside the classroom.
These types of classes are more realistic because this is what you will have to do out there: show up, work well with others and put forth real effort every day.