By Nancy Azzam & Mariyah Ramirez

The end of the year is often a very stressful time for students and teachers alike. Whether teachers choose to assign a big test or a big project, either way, the culminating assignment requires a lot of stress and effort.

Both tests and projects have their strengths and weaknesses. When teachers give out final projects, students can showcase their cumulative knowledge differently without the stress of an actual final exam and the time-consuming and tough process of studying everything covered in a semester. However, some students find comfort in the process of studying for an exam as they just need to study for a short amount of time rather than work on a project for days at a time.

However, in most classes, the final is worth ten percent of a student’s grade. A single test worth that many points can cause a lot of stress for students who are not strong test takers. With nerves that high, even students who know the material may not score as highly as they could in other situations, leaving grades that do not accurately represent the information that students retained that semester.

Projects, therefore, provide students with a far less stressful and more accurate representation of what they have learned.

Teachers must also weigh their own workload when deciding to give a test or project. Our teachers have five or six classes, with some teaching both APs and CPs. Therefore, they have to choose an option that doesn’t overwhelm their workload for grading when there is so much less time to grade as grades are due soon after the last final.

For example, science teacher Erica Brauer, a CP and honors Chemistry teacher, administers a final project to her classes which impacts her workload as well as her students’ workload in different ways.

“It affects my workload considerably, as grading the projects takes much longer than scanning a bubble sheet,” Brauer said. “I basically make my student’s finals week easier (although they have a lot of work to do during stop week), but the trade-off is I have a ton of work to do instead. I imagine this is the number one reason that many teachers do not do projects.”

Students tend to prefer projects as they receive better scores and don’t have to worry about memorizing a lot of information in a short period.

“I tend to get better scores and retain more information when I do projects,” senior Kyle Kim said.

However, most projects that teachers assign tend to be group projects. Although group projects teach us important collaborative skills, many students find that the work tends to fall unequally on some members, when not all students pull their fair share of the weight. This is unfair to those students doing the work as they have other classes to study for. The workload should not just be left to them on their own.

Final projects tend to be less demanding and less stressful than tests, but only if they are individual projects.