By: Ashley Paiva
As most of us know, a few weeks ago, the TDSB officially canceled exams and summatives for secondary students for the 2020/2021 school year. The marks will be solely based on the termwork they hand in such as assignments and tests. The question buzzing around is “How does everyone feel about this?”
After a question was released on Instagram asking students what they thought about the canceled exams and summatives, most people responded with the same answer. This was that it took a lot of stress off of them as most were worried about what exams would be like after not doing them the previous year. Of course, this is a completely understandable worry.
However, a few people, myself included, are concerned about not having exams this year as this will be the second year in a row with no final exams. This causes some stress for students because exams are crucial for the grade 10’s and 12’s specifically. Now, I'm not saying the 9’s and 11’s won’t suffer either, but in my opinion it isn’t as great a problem. The grade 10’s will struggle in grade 11 university level courses. And students in grade 10 haven't had an exam yet since they started high school, causing some of them to feel very nervous about going from a simple unit test all the way to a grade 11 exam. The grade 12’s will be graduating this year and those who are going to post-secondary school will have had less practice than usual with final exams. In students' opinion, to jump from a grade 10 exam to university exams will be quite difficult.
The grades 9’s and 11’s will also have a tricky time adjusting to a completely new level of exams not knowing what the difficulty of them the previous year was. Last year was quite interesting for me and a lot of the other grade 9’s, after finding out we weren’t having exams. Many of us were worried to start this year as we had no idea what to expect. And the grade 11’s now are trying not to think about how different a grade 12 exam could be compared to a grade 10 exam. What are your thoughts on the fact that we have no exams this school year?