Do we need to have finals? They can be a huge stress factor for teens because they can either improve their final grades or destroy them. Many things cause teen stress: school work, parents, friends’ problem, and younger and older siblings. According to teen help, school work causes 78% of teen stress, so why add finals to that school stress?

Schools do almost everything correctly in the fields of education, except for the testing strategies. The purpose of finals are to see if students can remember the material they covered over the course of a semester, but most students don’t study for test in advance. Instead, they wait and cram everything into their brain the night before a test. Taking big test on materials that students have learned throughout an entire semester and asking them to remember so much information is difficult on the brain. Rather than finals, we should have a final paper or portfolios describing what the students have learned throughout the year.