Exempting finals in high school?

anon94785555
Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:28:58 +0000

Although it seems nice at the time to be exempt those finals all of the preparation skills learned are useful for college. I still remember that eons ago we had year long courses with the final covering all of the material- made the time span for semester finals seem easier. Imagine seniors who take an AP exam one month before the end of the year and the teachers who have to teach that month and come up with a final (at least those are the best students). Son’s HS had senior finals the last week of classes, before the 3 days of finals (btw, they used to have 2 full days of finals but stretched them out), this meant juniors et al taking those classes (eg AP) either had the final then or with the others, I don’t remember. The finals days extended beyond some of the district’s HS graduations.

Perfect attendence is highly unlikely among the best students as they are most likely to have legitimate nonillness reasons to be gone from school. That is one award my son was never eligible for. It is good to encourage attendance but not good to attach finals to it. Our district has truancy laws and statistics- we were almost guilty of having a “habitual truant” when we took our gifted son out of elementary school for vacations (those were the days- when a kid could miss school days without it mattering and he wanted to be with his parents).