Finals start tomorrow. Seniors will be looking forward to being Second Semester. All four grades will be studying under their eyeballs bleed. As soon as I finish this post, I'm going to go brush up on my calculus in preparation for tomorrow afternoon. I will also probably spend my lunch break, between tests tomorrow, with a textbook.
My question for you all is why?
Say that you have a 91.5% in science, an A minus on the brink of B plusness and solid A alike. Say that finals are worth on average 12.5% of your semester grade (which they are). Do you know what grade you need on the final to keep your A minus? About seventy nine and a half percent - a C plus.
Say your parents will ground you if you have any grades in the C range. Do you know what grade you need to maintain at least 80% in your physics class is? Negative point five percent, according to my handy-dandy calculator. You could get a zero on the final and still have a B minus average.
Say you really want an A to impress that college you're applying to. Solid A is 93%, and to achieve that you would need to get one hundred and three point five percent on your final on Thursday. Which is possible, with curving, but if you haven't been acing your tests all semester, you're not likely to start now.
With brings us to the dominant fact: that you're probably going to do on your final what you've been doing all year. A week or two of hiding in your room with your physics book is ridiculously unlikely to change a months-long behavior pattern. If you have an A minus now, then by golly you'll probably have an A minus on the test and an A minus for the semester. (Unless you test really badly or really well. And keep in mind that most people who 'test badly' don't drop by more than ten percent, which in this scenario still gets you your A minus.)
So honestly, why the heck are we all so riled up?
Well, if you're in AS it's the unpredictability - without letter or numerical grades, no one's positive what footing they're on. I have heard people say that this is the final they're "freaking out about the most" - and it's a two page paper. We wrote longer essays for the freshman year final of the analogous EH class, two years ago. And again, your writing tomorrow is gosh darn it going to be roughly what your writing has been like for the last four and a half months. (I know my blog posts don't usually take more than the final's ninety-minute time limit.)
So where does that leave us? Do we honestly think that an extra half hour of studying crammed in on the bus will affect our grade? Is it the sheer amount of material to remember? I dislike that hypothesis - in many classes, including every math, language, and science course I've taken, each new chapter of content is built upon the last one. Try doing complex trig without knowledge of the Unit Circle. Do students simply have an irresistible need to be capable of controlling our futures, even at the last minute? Tell me what your reason for cramming is, or what you think others' might be.
And yes, even having written this, I will still be studying at 1:59 pm tomorrow, a minute before the exam.
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