It’s A Testy Time

The halfway point of the school year equals final exam time: something brand new to the ninth graders. We did the final exam testing last week and the kids seem to take it in stride. At least one freshman teacher gave his final exam before the schedule testing days. I'm not sure what he was thinking. Kids told me that they watched a movie during finals in  his class. Maybe he thought he was doing the kids a favor.

I have never agreed with final exams as a grading tool. Students who are doing well tend to do well in the final (It just means they are under that much more stress.) Likewise, students who are doing poorly in a class will do poorly in the test (even it is designed for them to do well). Many educators argue that a final exam gives these low scoring students an opportunity to improve their grades. I haven’t seen that happen more than a very few times.

Students going on to college have to learn to handle the pressure of final exams. I have no problem with testing these students since it helps them be more successful in college. The students who are not going to college do not need this experience. In fact, it just reinforces the feeling of hopelessness concerning school that predominates among these students. In my own basic science classes I deliberately design a test that anyone who is not a complete idiot can pass. Only apathetic students are not successful. Or should I say ‘pathetic’ students?

It seems as if the prevailing message across the land is that everyone needs to be prepared for college. That is unfortunate because not everyone is college material. But put a bunch of educators together and all of a sudden they forget reality and make up all of these benchmarks for students to attain. For example: all students in the state of Washington must complete Algebra 1 and 2 and Geometry to graduate. About 35% of Washington students are able to pass the math WASL so of course they are all capable of doing geometry. The old fashioned word for this thinking was “balderdash”!

Our final exams are scheduled at special times with two given each day for two hours each. Wednesday’s finals were interesting. School starts one hour later on Wednesdays so teachers can do all kinds of neat things relative to teaching/training. That meant that after finals the student class schedule was abbreviated. The afternoon classes were twenty minutes each. So of course quite a few students went home right after finals. The excuse was that their parents said it was ok. Lunch detention was so full this past week that they had to spread it out to additional rooms.

For my two fundamentals classes, I had the students complete a powerpoint about dinosaurs. I even let them start it two days before the scheduled final. Three students refused to do anything on the powerpoint. Two others did next to nothing on the powerpoint. It carried enough weight to raise grades for the semester nearly 10%. Only five students failed. Guess who they were.

Another day I’ll do a blog about student apathy.