What is Finals Week? Too many teenagers now would describe it as “the worst week ever”. It’s the week when students become the most stressed they’ve ever been. It’s where they cram in as much information for all their classes in their brain.

Can you imagine the amount of stress and anxiety high school students have had over these yearly tests?

Imagine the distress for freshmen and the relief for seniors. Going to a whole new environment and a new education level. And it is your last year in high school almost done with the end of the semester grade affecting assignments and tests.

Students around the U.S. have their stress levels through the roof because of some tests that affect almost half to a quarter of their grades.

What Santiago students have been saying

“I think for my math final I will probably get a 90-80% range and for bio roughly the same and probably for all of them 90-80% except for P.E. I’m going to fail that one no doubt about it.”

Many students seem to be very confident about what results they will receive from these big exams.

“I think I’m going to do good. I’ve already finished two of my finals and the other ones will be easy.”

“Spanish I got this, the two tests that I took 100%. My bio test I am failing but it’s fine because in my other finals and I got this.”

”I feel like I did better on my math final but not that good on my bio and language arts final.”

”I think I did well because they were multiple-choice tests.”

”I feel like I didn’t do as good on them as I thought I did.”

The students that I interviewed had 50/50 responses when I asked them all the same questions. I asked, “How do you think you did on your final exams”.

Some had very confident and positive responses for how they believed they did. Other people weren’t the most confident, some believed in not-so-good results. Because this generation is so anti-school and many students drop out yearly, many weren’t negative.

I think it’s great that the students at Santiago students are feeling great about their hard work this week.

Why are high schoolers more tense and stressed during this week?

Can you believe that 4-5 days at the beginning of December cause such chaos? How can those very short days feel just as long as a regular school day? The amount of information they have been memorizing just for one week. And the lack of sleep students have been experiencing

An article by Caitrin Blake states, “While some amount of pressure helps students maintain their motivation, not having any stress-management methods can cause an academic implosion.” Can you believe the amount of pressure these kids are going through at such a young age?