As a high school senior this year, I have spent a lot of time thinking about all things college. What college to go to, how to pay for it, how to best prepare for it, and how much harder will it be are questions constantly flowing through my mind. As the school year’s end comes closer and closer and I’ve found an answer to some of these questions, the ones I still wonder about seem to get larger and larger. With finals just signifying the end of the first semester, a new concern found its way into my thoughts… finals. My experience with finals so far has been to opt out of as many classes as I can, which gives me a nice two days of easy school. Spend my open classes sleeping in and studying, then go knock out a couple of tests and call it good. Not a lot of stress. I take it as any other test and move on. But college won’t be the same way.
In college, finals are way bigger than they are in high school. I have the pleasure of having two older siblings. One is a senior and the other a sophomore in college, so rather than speculate what to expect next year, I decided to ask the experts. While some of the things I got from them were things I already knew, more studying, more stress, and no opt-outs, other things I did not realize, and those are the things that separate college from high school.
The first major difference is that finals in high school are worth no more than a regular test, but in college, they are worth more. If you don’t do great on a final in high school, it’s not a big deal because it will go in just as a test would, and your grade may change by a percent or two. In college on the other hand, if you flunk a test, you’ll most likely flunk the whole class in general. College finals go in as a much higher percentage of your grade, so getting a bad score on a final can bring your grade down significantly. Another way it is different is how much information the test covers. For example, my math final was a 20-question test, with eight of the questions being from the last couple of chapters we had covered. I only had to review half to a third of the whole semester of notes to be fully prepared for the test to come. In college, however, the final will be over the whole semester. To be fully prepared, you would need to spend equal time studying the most recent topic you learned and the first thing you learned on the first day of class. The amount of content in the final makes it so much more difficult to prepare yourself for the test and makes it a lot harder than a high school final. The final reason college finals are different than high schools is because of the stakes. If you fail a final in high school or even fail the class, your GPA will drop, but it won’t be something that makes or breaks you as a student. That’s not the case for college. If you fail a class, your GPA will drop, which can be risky. It can take away scholarships, which will give you more student loans to pay for college, and, if your GPA drops enough, it could get you kicked out of college in general, which will set you up for failure later in life. The jobs you are eligible for will be greatly reduced, and the average pay in those jobs is lower than jobs that require a degree.
Overall, college finals are what I’d expect. The difference in final test difficulty is similar to that of the difference in overall class difficulty. They are pretty similar in setup though. You could have a test, project, or some sort of group work to finish off the semester, regardless of what grade you are in. So even though the tests may be more difficult, and you can’t out of them by having good grades, having some sort of familiarity with them makes me feel more prepared and confident for when the time for my first college final comes around.
