Exams, which occurred for Arrowhead students from January 19-21 this year, have just ended, and the school has moved onto second semester.

Although now the tests are over, students still have thoughts on them.

A sophomore student who requests to be anonymous jokingly remarked, “There were exams?” He didn’t have to attend due to personal reasons, to which he adds, “I feel kind of lucky I didn’t have to take them.”

Each exam was ninety minutes long–or an hour and a half–and passing times were twenty minutes long. This brought the school day to last from 7:30am to 12:50pm. Two therapy dogs could be found in the library every day for stressed out students to pet, and free breakfast as usual was provided in the cafeteria.

Nicholas Wilson, a senior, said, “I didn’t have to take many exams. Most of my classes had final projects instead.” Wilson prefers final projects over exams. “Final projects are a lot less stressful than exams, and I’m glad about that. They’re just a lot of work.”

A few classes do replace final exams with final projects. For example, in the advanced speech class, the final project is a spoken speech. 

A more exam-worn student, Austin Doty, who is a junior, says, “[Expletive] exams. They sucked. I’m glad they’re over.” 

Some students’ opinions on exams could be considered more controversial, but they’re very common. Some students went into more detail about the school system as a whole rather than just exams, including Doty.

“Exams are super stressful,” Doty adds. “I’m sure if you asked anyone else, they’d say the same. Nobody likes exams.”

Nathanael Zabel, another junior, agrees. “I hate our education system. Having things be learned for the express reason of spitting it back out weeks later on a test doesn’t help with retention.”

This claim is somewhat accurate, as according to the former President of Harvard University, “[Exams] are not about effectiveness. Although 99 percent of professors consider critical thinking an ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ goal of a college education, fewer than 20 percent of the exam questions actually tested for this skill.”

Zabel also thinks that the way school is set up is also physically unhealthy. “The seven hour school day is not set up for the teenage brain,” he says. “The constant need to go farther than what had been done in the past is pushing more and more people in every generation to their breaking point. If they were able to leave at their own choice they would be more likely to get a better job that is good for the economy.”