The Board of Education officially discontinued two-hour final exams last Tuesday and decided to implement county-standardized quarter assessments beginning next school year.

The Board voted to eliminate finals in September. Centrally-developed quarter assessments will be given during regular class periods and are intended to take exams’ place in measuring student progress, MCPS wrote on their website.

The decision came in response to “school and community interest in reducing testing and increasing instructional time,” according to the MCPS website.

Without exams weeks in January and June, teachers will have an extra two weeks of instructional time.

MCPS will end finals in classes with PARCC or HSA exams, including Biology, English 10, Algebra 1 and NSL, this school year. The Board plans to adopt an alternative grading system in place of the current one, which counts finals as 25 percent of students’ final grades. There are four proposed options: averaged quarter grades, averaged quality points, trend grades and teacher-made finals.

MCPS released an extensive list of concerns they received from public outreach initiatives including online surveys, focus groups and letters following their recent decision. Some worried that the new plan would add to teachers’ and students’ work burden and or fail to prepare students for college.

Despite the criticism, MCPS stands by the decision, pointing to two other local counties—Anne Arundel and Loudon—which have also eliminated exams.