The most stressful and hectic portion of the school year for the average college student is undoubtedly the end of the semester. It’s a time where students have to balance different responsibilities and cram in time for studying or doing projects. While students shoulder these responsibilities, they must also pass rigorous finals which could make or break their entire grade. Therefore, finals should be uniform in the amount they’re worth in a student’s grade. 

Students should not have their grades be defined by how well they have done on finals. While finals are meant to be a summary of the knowledge which a student has acquired over a semester length class, that shouldn’t mean that the final is the only assignment which matters. A professor can assign multiple smaller assignments to relieve the burden a student may have while doing a major final. 

 However, the burden of how finals should be assigned should not solely fall on the professors who assign them. The way that finals are assigned should be a consistent change within the education system itself. Instead of each professor deciding how much of a student’s grade a final is worth, there should be a uniform amount set to how much a final is worth, so that a final doesn’t destroy a student’s grade in the case that a student only doesn’t do well on it. 

 In contrast to that, Skyline Professor Michael Cross spoke about how finals shouldn’t be worth the same amount per class due to the context of the class. 

 “I don’t think that professors should be having like one big funnel project that can make or break a student’s grade,” Cross said. “I don’t think that there should ever really be a one-size-fits-all model for how something like a final should work, because I think it really depends on the class and what the professor’s trying to do in the class.”

Many college students work part-time jobs which don’t always give them enough free time to complete such large assignments in a short amount of time. According to data from California’s Cradle-to-Career data system, 52% of California community college students are in the workforce. Meaning that when students are expected to complete finals, which are large-scale, rigorously-graded assignments, they also have to contend with balancing their responsibilities. In addition, students have other classes they need to attend, meaning that they have to deal with multiple finals within a few weeks or even days of each other. 

In contrast, Skyline student Leilani McAllister spoke about how she thinks that regardless of how much a final is worth, at the end of the day, it’s still a student’s responsibility. 

“But even if I’m stressed, I’m the one that signed up for school,” McAllister said. “So I feel like [it’s] sometimes on me to come up to the plate and be able to handle the class and be prepared for the final.” 

Nevertheless, the stress that finals cause is a problem, and there must be a solution to alleviate it. The simplest way to solve that is through the uniform solution of making finals worth the same amount per class, however that is only one of many other solutions that can be implemented in the future. 

The Skyline View editorial has no byline because it is the voice of TSV’s Editorial Staff.