When approaching the end of the year, seniors definitely have it the best. They get out before everyone else and get an early start to their summer.

As a junior and underclassman, this is hard to see and the jealousy becomes too real. It doesn’t help that the week seniors get out is HSA week, which most juniors don’t have to participate in, so we basically have a week of barely any school and teachers hardly even teach. This taste of summer is too much of a tease and makes it hard to come back the next week after Memorial Day and focus on finishing off the school year strong.

Finishing off junior year strong is a crucial part of your high-school career. Since most say junior year is the most-important year of high school for getting into college, it is very important to do your best. The obstacles juniors face at the end of junior year should be eliminated. If possible, HSA week should not be as close to the end of the year as it was this year. Although it was nice to have a week to sleep in and only have a half day of school, it causes juniors, and even underclassmen, to get sidetracked and lose focus on what is important, and it causes us to go into summer mode too quickly before the year has even ended. The pros fall short of the cons when looking at it from an academic viewpoint, which is more important than the pleasure viewpoint.

Although it is not proven that students do worse when HSA’s come this late in the year, I’m sure that many students can agree that it makes it that much harder. Moving these important tests to earlier in the year would most likely be the best thing to do for the students’ benefit. The end of the year and the last couple of weeks of school already have enough breaks, especially with Memorial Day weekend and graduation; those two days alone are enough of a taste of summer to satisfy us until we finish that last exam. The HSA testing week should not be as late in the year as it was in 2014.