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School Finals
"The ever popular 'cramming' is the art of having to study all the cumulative work of the past year all the way back to September on the night before a final."
By Sam Ross
This is the dreaded time of year for many high school students. Why? Because it’s finals season, and my finals were last week. I think it’s good to approach them with a strategy: try to get the grade you want with the minimum amount of studying. Now how did I do this? First, I calculated what grade I needed to get on the final to keep or raise my grade.
This way, I was able to designate the amount of time I spent studying efficiently—so I didn’t end up spending eight or nine hours studying for a test that I only need a D on to keep my grade. My parents think it’s funny that I have all these calculations, but they really do save time and effort. But even with strategies like this, to do well on your finals, you need to spend some time doing good old studying from the books.
Why should you try so hard, because of the pressure? Now with all the competition to get into college, especially the UC’s, there is added pressure to do well on the finals. At my freshman orientation, our principal preached to us that if you didn’t succeed in high school, you wouldn’t succeed after it. I personally don’t believe this at all, and many students say they don’t either, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel the pressure. Unnecessary pressure is not the only problem with finals.
There’s also the method of studying. The ever-popular “cramming” is the art of having to study all the cumulative work of the past year all the way back to September on the night before a final. Teachers say not to do it, but it’s hard to avoid. They tell students to start studying a week or so before the tests. Unfortunately, that’s the time of year when we’re busy doing all of the projects the teachers forgot to assign us earlier in the semester.
This year, I tried to study over the three day weekend. But wait: do they really expect us to be able to study for six classes on a sunny weekend with all sorts of distractions? So I crammed the night before the final. One of the biggest problems with cramming is that when you do cram, you usually forget everything you studied by the next week and it seems really useless. And we’re supposed to go to school for learning and fun?
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