Exam week. The most dreaded week of the school year, a time notorious for giving students nonstop headaches. Every time exam week comes around, calls for reform come with it with many students and teachers questioning if it is the right system, and finally, we have gotten change, but is it really the kind of change we need?

The argument behind the original call for reform was that exam week was too much because students were being “over tested.” Taking this into account, our Board of Education has recently announced that they plan on scrapping our current exam system, and instead having 45 minute, quarterly assessments. This new system was met with resoundingly negative comments; many people, students and teachers alike, do not like the system. In fact, according to the Washington Post, “More than 90 percent of 214 staff members opposed doing away with the county’s semester-end tests in recent public comments submitted to the school system.” People feel that the new system is just as, if not more, unnecessary and flawed, and with good reason.

The logic behind the new system is completely wrong because it defeats the very purpose of high school: college readiness. In college, students do not have a set finals week, but they take tests structured similarly to our old system. Students come to class on a specified date and take a test for an amount of time that varies, depending on the professor’s discretion. Now, the old system, as difficult as it was to deal with, made a lot of sense in this respect; it is similar to college and prepares students to some degree for long tests they may face in their higher education. That is the problem with our new system: it is exactly like regular unit tests that every student is used to, but will not encounter in college, where it really counts. The way that this new exam structure is, students will go through four years of high school having no experience with long, often difficult exams, and will be slammed with the system of finals in college, and even the SAT.

The reform on the system of exams in MCPS was done with good intentions, but it is not the answer to the flaws of our old system. The old system works well in the fact that it prepares students to some degree for the difficulty of college, it just needs a few tweaks. These minor fixes should definitely be focused on actual preparation for final exam week. As many students have experienced, teaching often continues until the school day before exams, with an “exam review day” thrown in to show that the school is focused on preparing students. It should come as a surprise to no one that one day of “review” is obviously not enough to cover an entire semester’s worth of material. It does not work, plain and simple. Instead of restructuring the system entirely, the school board should focus on changing the curriculum in a way that gives students and teachers more time to review material for the exam. This is just one idea that could help fix our broken system, and there are many others that could prove to be tremendously successful, but the new idea that MCPS has implemented will not be as successful as it is hoped to be.