The student news site of Clayton High School.

The Globe

The student news site of Clayton High School.

The Globe

The student news site of Clayton High School.

The Globe

Finals should focus on evaluating skills, not material

Oh, how the time has flown.  With winter break days away, thoughts of snow, freedom and sleep dance about in students’ minds.  Yet lying between now and bliss is the guardian of the threshold, the feared and dreaded final exams.  Though finals have been in place for years, it has come time for Clayton’s administration to take a hard look at the value and legitimacy of its exams.

The purpose of finals is simple: to evaluate students’ knowledge and understanding of a subject area.  This is a perfectly valid goal and deserves no criticism.  The methods used to go about this purpose are questionable, though.  Teachers require students to recall facts and details learned months ago, which, if the student missed that packet or worksheet while studying, leaves him or her helpless.  Final exams are, for the most part, entirely material-based, meaning students have to study and memorize the material covered in the class.  This is purely ludicrous.

Forcing students to memorize facts and details does not make practical sense.  My future does not depend on my knowing that Franklin Roosevelt was governor of New York before becoming president or my ability to regurgitate the quadratic formula or the value of Planck’s constant.  It is dubious that memorizing Aristotle’s definition of a tragedy will aid me as I head into my adult life, and I would bet a million dollars that knowing that it was Duncan who said, “What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won” will ever be of real value to me.

Instead of the current system of asking students to spit back the definitions or equations that they have memorized nine hours prior to the test (and will likely forget nine hours later), it would behoove teachers to take a more qualitative approach.  Students should be evaluated on the skills that they have learned in the class, not the material itself, for skills are not easily forgotten.  Since it is the skills that we will be taking with us as we leave CHS, it makes far more sense for us to be tested on them than the raw material.

For example, history finals should incorporate more document-based questions that force students to analyze a document using the material they have studied and the skills they have learned.  English exams should focus on reading and writing skills and a student’s ability to analyze and respond to a reading.  Math and science are slightly trickier, but for the most part the idea remains the same.  The final exams should be less about memorizing equations and more focused on applying those formulas and methods to real-life situations.  Language finals, unfortunately, need to stress memorization-heavy things like vocabulary and tense structures, but teachers should still focus on a holistic approach that evaluates a student’s ability to use the language in everyday applications.

I understand that teachers are unlikely to purge all material-based questions from their tests, ant quite frankly I wouldn’t want them to.  Details and specifics can be important and are worth knowing, they’re just not the most important part of what we learn in class.  Thus I do not suggest a complete erasure of factual and detail-based questions, just a draw-down to accommodate an increased emphasis on the evaluation of skills.

By slightly altering the format of their tests teachers could fairly evaluate a student’s competence in a certain class.  At the same time, they would be forcing students to stress what is, in the end, the most important aspect of a class.  After all, it is not the dates, the definitions, or equations that we will take with us as we leave adolescence.  Instead, it is the skills and techniques for learning and applying our knowledge that will prove useful and vital to our futures, and it is on these that we should be tested.

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The student news site of Clayton High School.
Finals should focus on evaluating skills, not material