As we reach the end of the school year, students are about to start taking finals and other end of school year testing. Some of these tests are AP tests, KSA testing, and finals for their classes. This can be a lot for students to try to study for and can be very stressful trying to balance their time with all these tests at the same time. However, schools have started to try to lessen the load on students by offering opportunities to exempt from certain tests by doing well on their finals.
KSA testing is done by the state to measure how well the school is doing at instructing their students. Since the students don’t receive a personal grade on this that impacts them, the common trend is that students will not try very hard on these and just give half effort. The school has seen this trend and has offered students a great incentive. If students can score proficient or distinguished they will get to exempt from a final in that subject that they scored proficient or distinguished in. I thought this was a very good idea because it would take weight off me at the end of the year getting to exempt some of my finals at the end of the year.
However, I eventually learned that if a student is taking an Advanced Placement or Dual Credit class then they are unable to use their exemptions on it. This was very unfortunate because after getting an exemption in the Math category I immediately realized that I would never be able to use it. I think this is a big downside from offering the final exemptions in the sense that students are seemingly being punished for taking harder classes and being unable to use it. I think a possible solution would be to add extra credit for these advanced classes if the school can not allow students to use their pass to be exempt from the actual final. This would allow students to still use the reward in a beneficial way but still uphold the rule of not allowing students to skip the final in Advanced Placement or Dual Credit classes.
Overall, I think the idea of offering final exemptions is a great one. Students will want to be able to skip their finals and the only way is to score good on these tests. I think it will achieve the goal of making students give more effort on the KSA testing. However, I think there are some errors with this right now and there are a few easy solutions that could be changed to make this idea even more effective and encourage even more students to give their best effort on these tests.
