The week that is known to cause stress and pressure on students worldwide. Knowledge acquired throughout the year is jam-packed into the minds of students as they attempt to perform well on the closing evaluations of the semester. As the first month of the new year comes to a close, Upper School students prepare for their virtual finals.

Parker faculty have spent the recent months planning a final that would be best suited to a remote platform. Upper School French teacher Cynthia Marker decided to use the online application FlipGrid for her final evaluation. She intends to create a final that stimulates a conversational skill level through the use of dialogue. 

“I usually don’t opt for a two-hour intensive exam. I don’t find that to be very productive,” Marker said. “I like the final to be something you can be proud of and an opportunity to show off the confidence you’ve built in expressing yourself in the target language.”

Upper School English teacher Alicia Abood is likewise using a conversational approach to finals. Abood is striving to have her students engage in in-class discussion and debate. If in-person learning was still taking place, Abood says that she would have done her finals slightly differently. 

“There’s a good chance I would have done something more small group based and more collaborative if I would have been able to get more time for students to work on it,” Abood said.

Throughout recent meetings within the Student Government, the student body has expressed appreciation for teachers actively trying to make finals a less stressful experience, especially being online. A majority of students agree that doing finals that are project or presentation based would have a more reliable outcome since more opportunities to cheat present themselves on a virtual exam. 

“Finals virtually is different, but I think teachers are doing a good job giving more projects rather than tests,” sophomore Jaritzi Lopez Martinez said. “Even though it’s stressful, it still helps.”

Junior Aidan Young also believes that taking an approach to finals involving projects would be more beneficial. “Taking an exam, especially with academic integrity, makes it difficult,” Young said. “A project, in terms of studying and working with someone else or working by yourself, is a lot less complicated. Communication is important and projects encourage people to interact with someone else.”

Only skepticism and uncertainty surround second semester finals, but Marker stated that if the Upper School is still engaged in remote learning, she will continue to try and limit screen time for her students. “If we’re still on Zoom then, I’d probably be inclined to make finals less tiring and stressful by choosing a conversational piece over a research project. I would like students to have concrete documentation of their progress and even enjoy demonstrating all they have learned in French.”

Young believes that the current format for virtual finals is operating sufficiently. “If we do stay online I think this format is working well, I haven’t been overly stressed,” Young said. “The main source of stress comes from the outside world and the news.” 

Throughout the Spring of 2020, Parker faculty scrambled to organize final presentations, projects, exams, and more to thoroughly assess information learned over the semester. With more time for preparation, Abood is feeling more confident in the planning process for second semester finals. Amidst the newly introduced hybrid format, Abood mentioned that finals would heavily rely on the amount of meeting time between her and her class.

“If we’re in a hybrid format, I feel like I may be seeing my students the same amount or even less than I am right now,” Abood said. “It’s just going to depend on how many opportunities we have to really be together and to build our class community.

Abood misses the in-person learning format and specifically the “energy” that students bring to her classroom. “I miss the energy of being in a room with students. I think that students have done an excellent job of trying to bring themselves to Zoom and trying to participate.”