To the relief of some and the dismay of others, exams will become a thing of the past after the Board of Education voted Tuesday to end final exams starting next school year.

Instead, teachers will determine grades with either averaged quarter grades, trend grades, final projects or averaged quality points. Currently, teachers add up grades from the two quarters and an exam.

Some are looking forward to less testing.

“Up until now, for some of these kids, it doesn’t matter. [They think] ‘I can flunk this exam and I can still get a B in the class,’ and that’s unfortunately been the attitude,” said foreign language teacher Isabella Kyser.

Special education English teacher Laurie Safran also appreciates moving away from the focus on testing.
“We often see kids very successful using their special education supports in their classes and failing final exams,” she said. “I think this will be a great opportunity for them to not have to sit through that length of time to take a final exam.”

While there’s some support for the initiative, there are downsides, especially for teachers’ timing.

“While I think a extra couple of weeks of instruction is a good thing, it’s really nice to have that time at the end of a school year to finish grading papers and projects,” said English teacher Emily Glass. “Without that time built into our day I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

The county is also struggling with developing a new way to test accumulated knowledge at the end of a course, Principal Alan Goodwin said.

From a student perspective, a common concern is the impact on the future.

“Our major objection is that it hurts students because the reason they brought these in was to help students prepare for their college final exams,” math department head Russell Rushton said.

How MCPS came to the decision is also stirring controversy.

“I was shocked that a major policy had no input from teachers, students, teachers, administrators,” history department head Bob Mathis said. “Forget the outcomes, whether it was good or bad, I just thought there wasn’t much processing done by the public.”

There may be no general consensus among departments on the new policy.

“In language courses we do so much testing and things along the way, do we really need a final exam? I don’t know. Maybe in some courses final exams are more important,” Kyser said.
“There has to be some type of cumulative type of thing at the end, and I think we do that anyway.”

Until the new grading system is further defined in November and then enacted, the result is somewhat unknown.

“Until these questions get answered, I really don’t know if it’s going to be good or bad,” Mathis said.