Students Should Be Permitted to Keep Final Exams

Students can attest that final exams are some of the most daunting assessments as they serve as a culmination of a year of learning. Sidwell Friends holds its final exams two weeks before summer break, with students receiving a letter grade for them on their second-semester report card and their overall semester grade. While students can view their exams after the summer, they cannot keep them. This limitation hinders students’ ability to improve based on feedback, as they can only view exams for a few minutes. Regardless of the fact that students can view and receive feedback on their exams, they should be permitted to keep them permanently as a potential reference for academic growth and aid in studying. 

Sidwell prides itself on being a community rooted in Quaker values, but withholding final exam feedback counters principles such as integrity, reflection and learning for life. Reflection, in particular, is a core pillar of learning, and it is impossible to do without permanent and thorough access to one’s work. After taking an exam, students must learn and improve from their mistakes. Since students can only glance at their results briefly, it is a challenge for them to grasp and understand their mistakes fully. Permitting students to retain their exams allows for more careful reflection and an implementation of the feedback they received on future assessments. 

Exam feedback not only reduces future errors, but also serves as an excellent reference for review on future assessments. With access to test-level questions, students can become more familiar with past concepts that may arise again. While one could argue that exam feedback from old subjects is not helpful in the following school year, many concepts build off one another, especially in STEM subjects. For example, juniors could benefit significantly from feedback on their chemistry final exam when preparing for a biology test. Additionally, mistakes can fall under similar categories, and keeping exam feedback will allow students to troubleshoot their mistakes more accurately. 

During the summer, students are encouraged to step back from their usual academics and instead indulge in other interests. Inevitably, this can lead to material being forgotten. Allowing students to keep final exams can help to jog their memories and review past material as they step back into classrooms in the fall.

At Sidwell, students can usually keep their unit tests and quizzes to view areas for improvement. Sophomore Sasha Schooling noted that, “We are already able to keep our tests, so we should also be able to keep our exams as well because they are essentially the same thing.” Schooling, along with many others, already utilizes her past assessments to target areas for improvement in future ones. Both smaller assessments and exams are an evaluation of the material learned in class. Without permanent access to the exams, it becomes quite difficult for students to learn from mistakes and work toward not making them again.

Many teachers at Sidwell offer detailed feedback on homework, essays, and quizzes throughout the semester. That feedback is crucial to student success, so there is no reason why finals should differ. Just because final exams occur at the end of the semester does not mean they are less valuable to the learning process. If anything, the high stakes of final exams make feedback even more beneficial in helping students prepare and correct before next year.

The following fall, students can visit their teachers to view their final exams. Nonetheless, simply viewing feedback rushedly is ineffective for students to grasp what they got wrong. Although teachers allow time for questions, students may not have any to ask after glancing at the exam. Questions arise only after thoroughly reviewing the exam and meticulously reflecting upon it. Thus, students should be allowed to keep their final exams.