As all students at Libertyville High School know, finals have been given the second week after winter break for as long as they can remember. But has anyone wondered if it has always been this way and if it will ever be subject to change? And lastly, what about other schools?
According to the Daily Herald, the switch of finals week from after winter break to before winter break appears to be a trend in suburban schools of the Chicagoland area: “High schools in Elgin Area Unit School District U-46 made the change last year. Grant High School District 124, Mundelein District 120, Wauconda High School District 118, Round Lake Area Unit District 116 and Warren Township High School District 121 in Lake County have been ending the first semester before winter break for years.”
Similarly, the Chicago Tribune notes that Maine Township High School District 207 will be making the trade-off due to a “survey, posted on the district website, ask[ing] students, parents and faculty to weigh in on the beginning date of the fall semester and final exams, while detailing the benefits and drawbacks of a potential change.”
Due to the consensus that the district came to as a result of the survey, additional discussion among the administrators is needed before making the change immediately.
Seeing this trend of schools relatively close to Libertyville must make students wonder whether this will ever be applied to District 128.
“[The subject of final exams] has come up quite a few times since I’ve been here and the decision-making has come to that impasse that we have 185 days contractually. If you look at a semester, this year [in the first semester] there are 94 teacher days and 90 student days and the second semester we have 91 teacher days and 89 student days, so you can see that that’s pretty balanced. So, if we were to have finals before break, that would throw this to be about 10 days imbalanced and for us to start a week earlier too,” LHS principal Dr. Marina Scott explained.
However, with the new style that finals have taken form of, perhaps a little of the workload and stress can be taken off of students’ shoulders.
“In some classes, already in English classes, we switched over to a more skills-based final exam and that’s happening in all of the courses now with the advent of Common Core. So, your finals may be evolving into the kind of test that uses new information to test the skills so it’s not a memorization of information or facts, so it doesn’t allow you to study as much or have to study as much as you had in the past because it’s the kind of test you really can’t study for,” Dr. Scott shared.
So although many students and teachers feel that finals before break would be beneficial to learning, District 128 is most likely not making the switch over in the near future in order to keep the student days and teacher days per semester balanced and allow for school to start in late August.
“I would like to see [final exams] be given before break to give you a true break and the teachers too, but what I hear from the community feedback and from teachers is that starting August 10 breaks into their summer vacation time and if you look at our summer school schedule too, our summer school ends that last week in July, so that gives them a one-week break. I think solving one problem creates another,” Dr. Scott concluded.
