With the well-known state of COVID-19, Camas High School students are wondering what the new year will bring for remote learning and how this might affect finals. The staff gave an idea of what finals will look like, how they will play out, and a few different strategies teachers will be using this year. 

Finals are not taken lightly, they serve as an overall test for each individual class and are used to see how well you genuinely did that semester. Typically finals take place and are only offered through in-person schooling. This year has sparked up some attention and concern for how finals will occur. CHS, like other schools, is working towards finding a way to effectively put out finals, whether they are presentations, group projects, tests, ect. After speaking with Brady Miletich, a business teacher at CHS, he was able to give me some insight on his perspective of finals.

Miletich said, “I think every teacher will do what works best for them and fits with what they have been doing in class. For a lot of us, this will be different than a normal year.”  

When Miletich was asked about his plans for finals. He said, “For most of my finals I like to incorporate a project or presentation, this is pretty hard to cheat on. The goal is to put my students in a position to demonstrate what they have learned and that can be done in a lot of different ways.”

This is one of the more common ways teachers are portraying finals due to the fact that a standard test can be easy to cheat on and there’s no way to generate and see what the students are truly thinking or have learned. This past semester has been extremely stressful and unlike any other semester. This has been a new experience for both teachers and students, making them see education in a different, more flexible way.

Miletich said, “Overall I think teachers and students need to be flexible with finals just like we have with everything else this year.”

Math teacher Alisa Wise has a different take on finals for each of her classes.

She said, “For our Algebra 2 cohort, we have decided to not give finals because of your very questions – we cannot prevent cheating, there is no way to measure student learning (with the tools we have available) that will promote integrity, academic honesty and be valid for measurement,” Wise added, “For Geometry, our cohort has decided to give a “version” of a final- and the answer is no, we don’t yet know quite what that will look like as of yet – but we have an idea.” She also says that finals for all classes will be different just in general since we are all online.”

Science teacher Kathryn Carmichael explained her plans. She said,  “Instead of doing a whole semester final, I’ll just be doing a unit test.  I only do a unit test every year for AP chemistry so that isn’t any different than other years but it is different for physical science.”

Carmichael shared that she still has yet to completely figure out what she will be doing for finals and that everything is different this year, so she is also unsure of what other teachers are doing. She plans to try and prevent cheating by timing the test but other than that it is not much you can do. 

Teachers exclaimed that curating a final for this year will be challenging since it is very difficult to prevent cheating. However, students and staff will continue to look to the future for the ability to return to in-person learning in second semester.