Final grades went up on Pinnacle last night.  How did the new system work out for everybody?  Not so great?  Well, you’re hardly alone.

This past Tuesday, freshman and sophomore English students spent approximately 45 minutes waiting.  Time ticked by and these unfortunate students were left without their final.  Somehow, someway, every single test got copied wrong, pretty much wasting the entire period for both the students and the proctors of their tests.  Students who didn’t get enough time (pretty much all of them) were required to make it up on the last day of finals after everybody else got to go home.  Everything was in disarray.  People were angry.  Time had been wasted.  And to be honest, this was just one of many things that went wrong last week.

The whole finals ordeal was complicated after complicated.  Personally, I was left with half of my English multiple choice questions missing and my A.P. environmental science short answer test MIA for the first half hour.  I don’t think it’s any coincidence that those are the finals I did the worst on.  I already get stressed out about the time limit on normal finals; this just added to the pressure.

What about the teachers?  That’s right, they weren’t there.  Instead we were abandoned.  Thrown to the dogs by the administration.  No offense to the biology teacher who stood there and looked around aimlessly while I took my trigonometry test, but you weren’t exactly there for me when I had questions.  And that was how it was supposed to be– with math and science teachers proctoring each others’ tests. The worse arrangement was the math teachers being tossed in with English students.  It’s not like students use their teachers to find out the answers during the test, but sometimes questions on finals are not quite clear and the people who wrote the test are usually the ones who can clear that sort of thing up.  People who haven’t looked at the subject for the last 20 years aren’t a lot of help.

That doesn’t even touch conflicts.  Students who took multiple tests in one subject answer, like seniors who took A.P. psychology and A.P. European history, had to move one test and take it in the student commons.  The student commons– where about 50 to 75 people could be found at any given period.  The student commons– where the talking never really seemed to stop.  The student commons– where anyone who didn’t use the pandemonium as a way to get a bit of extra, mid-test, studying done was probably a sucker.  The student commons– where I know a large group of people spent half an hour waiting to get their test.  If Niles West doesn’t do something to change the conflict issue, then the whole system will continue to be an absolute joke.  Rescheduling tests gives the students with a later test the exact advantage the administration has been trying to avoid.

Something has to change in this new system, or we should go back to the way it was.  Personally, the whole ordeal was a mess. I’m glad I’ll only have to go through it one more time.  Obvious errors need to be fixed to help out everyone who isn’t a senior and will be seeing this set up at least a few more times.