Finals is a week of stress. A week in which you take everything you’ve learned from half of a school year, and see it crammed into a test or big project.  During a week that feels like a month. If you’re like me, you walk into the tests thinking, If I don’t do well on this, I might get an X, but if I do well on this, then I’ll get a Y.

We want to be in the loop about how we’re doing, especially during that tumultuous time. There isn’t a concrete policy on this, so you may have a teacher that lets you see your grade with the tap of a finger, or one that either has to spend time putting together your assignments to get the grade, or doesn’t finish finalizing it until the very end.

You see some uniformity of these rules within departments, but administrators leave this more up to the teacher. This brings me to ask: Should teachers be obligated to show students their overall grade in the class before finals?

Yes. I know you are supposed to try your hardest on everything, especially finals, but knowing your grades really makes you a better preparer for exams. To do well, do you need regular studying every night and some talking with your peers, or just one desperate teacher meeting?  Or do you need to make a study guide three times over, and study until you see stoichiometry everywhere you go?

I understand that grading differs across departments. In classes such as math and science, you probably are given your quiz and test scores right away, and there isn’t much of a participation aspect or anything like that.

But in English and history, sometimes being part of discussions can be a large part of your grade, and teachers need to work these into their decisions before telling you where you stand, grade-wise.

A department that can go both ways is the language department. For example one language teacher has students’ grades filed away, and the teacher will usually not be able to give you your grade percent when you want, but will give you a grade range–or tell you to wait until the end of the semester, if it’s nearing the end. Finals week is the teacher’s time to formulate grades, the teacher explained to me, including aspects like participation and effort.  And the teacher doesn’t try to figure this out early before it’s completed.

Students should be trying hard on their finals regardless of their grades, but that is completely beside the point. It should be our right to choose how much and what we do for our final preparations, and not knowing your grade, especially for me personally, just makes finals more stressful, makes me more uncertain of its benefit for my grade, and makes it harder for me to see the full picture when evaluating my classes, what I need to do to be successful.

Teachers give students pop quizzes, piles of long homework assignments, and the unwavering responsibility to turn bright high schoolers into sleep-deprived, anxiety-filled perfectionists. OK, maybe I exaggerate a little, but I truly think that the least a teacher can do to make the end of a semester smoother and clearer is to let a student know what their grade is–before they get to their final.

We need to look at other important facts, too, and not put all of the blame on teachers’ neglect or ill-preparedness for this question. A lot of times, teachers don’t fully know what your final grade is until the end.  Such is the case with language classes.

Another important factor is outdated technology. Although we have those teachers that have all the grades all filled into different slots on an organized webpage, not all teachers are that tech savvy. Some teachers keep their students’ work filed away in a non-digital format, and it can take them a while to calculate overall grades.

A teacher may have students quiz grades and such organized in files designated for each student, and the teacher, possibly manually, has to add scores up and separate them based on what they are, making it a viable but much longer process.

Students could try to influence policy so as to require all teachers make grades more accessible, but I don’t think that teachers are just trying to make us more stressed by not giving us this access.  That is probably not the case.

If you’re that student that really needs grade information, no matter what, here are some options. First, talk to the teacher. Assuming you’ve had the teacher for at least a few months now, you probably know them well enough to voice your concerns, and to either ask for a grade ahead of time, or schedule a meeting with them to tell them why this is important.

Second, you could talk to an administrator–not necessarily about the individual teacher, but about advocating for all teachers to have a fast and efficient way of giving you your grade at such times.

I couldn’t say whether this would work or to what degree, but if you present a serious case, you will be taken seriously and responded to.

Last solution: deal with it, and assume that doing your absolute best in finals is what will earn you the grades you want.