Final Exam Fun: Creative Projects to Demonstrate Learning

Finals week is the most stressful time of the year for not only students, but teachers as well. Students need to study for tests, memorize multiple-choice answers, and teachers need to grade essays, along with students’ late work, before final grades are due.

Nobody truly enjoys the feeling of being pressured to complete work within a certain time frame. So instead of doing boring tests, essays, or multiple-choice-based questions, some teachers started to get creative with their students’ finals, allowing their students to think outside of the box.

A lot of staff are doing things like incorporating art and creative freedom with their students and pushing them to choose what they want to do.

Like Ms. Jach, who teaches Animal and Plant Science. She is allowing her students to pick and decide what they would like to do for their final, like a poster or papier-mache.

Jach is a big proponent of student choice and allowing her students to make decisions for themselves. She even stated that “the more choices that students have the more buy-in they have and the more learning they get from it, especially when they can figure out what they want to do and how they want to do it.”

Another teacher who wanted their students to branch out to better understand their knowledge is Katey Ingram, Social Studies and Psychology teacher. In Psychology, her students are doing a project-based final where the students get to research mental health disorders in depth and present their findings in a visual way.

“I selected this format because it allows students to engage more deeply and meaningfully with the material we’ve covered,” Ingram said.

Her students agree. Freshman Khiyrie Williams appreciated this final exam format, saying “I prefer creative finals because I can express myself better. I learned a lot from this project about the subject and about myself.”

Other creative finals this semester include Spanish 5-6’s roundtable of Spanish-only discussion, completing an engine build in Small Engines, baking layered cakes in Baking and Pastries, cooking a recipe from beginning to end in Foods II, and designing costumes, makeup, set, and props in Intro to Theatre. Clearly, the options are endless!

Creative finals allow students to think for themselves and teach them responsibility. Most teachers agree that this method can and will help students rely on no one but themselves and their actions, with the outcome being their final grade.

This is one of many steps that some teachers take to help their students for their future in the long run.

Good luck on finals, UHS!