As school winds down and we enter the final stretch of the school year, thoughts of final exams and summer break fill the minds of many students. And why not? Since the last week of school consists of 3-hour-long half-days, we are able to spend more time in the throes of existential crisis and worry, or perhaps more productively, in our room frantically cramming for finals. But as I sit at home at 2 pm participating in perhaps too much of the former, I find myself a little confused about the short days.

Now, I am all for having less school; sometimes. I would never complain about having the opportunity to get a little extra rest in, however, having an entire week consisting of half-days at the end of the year seems to me somewhat unwieldy. I understand the practicalities of not overloading students with too many final exams on the same day, but having certain students make the lengthy trek to the school every day just to have them stay for a couple of hours is not very conducive to attendance. Some students have plans of skipping school on the days that they do not have any final exams, which is not something that the system should encourage.

For quite a few students, the ride to and from the school is about the same amount of time that they spend in class during these days, and as a result it can feel like a chore, something unnecessary. It’s a strange break from the normal routine, and by having the classes stay the same length at 90 minutes, it doesn’t really spell anything different for final exams, which often contribute a significant amount to students’ grades. It forces such important assessments to be constrained to the apparent magnitude of a normal test.

There are many other ways to plan out days for final exams, and admittedly, there are definitely a lot of options that are much worse than what we currently have. However, I believe that there are also better ways to not overload students while also not seemingly playing down the importance of the final week of school.