As we approach the end of the semester and prepare for the much-anticipated summer break, there is one last challenge that all college students must confront: Finals week. This week is right around the corner, and so is the possibility of experiencing burnout. While college students face stress and anxiety throughout the semester, burnout often peaks during finals or in the weeks leading up to it.

Moreover, nothing increases the fear of failing your classes or lowering your GPA more than a cumulative final exam. To reduce a student’s burnout and emotional and mental strain, final exams need to be non-cumulative. 

Finals week is universally disliked, and for those students who have to endure heavily weighted cumulative finals in their classes this semester, the week becomes even more intimidating. Even with the helpful resources and events provided by UMaine clubs and organizations during the days leading up to final exams to give students a break from academics, the reality of starting or continuing exam reviews and preparations will eventually set in. 

It is understandable how being overwhelmed can easily turn into burnout, considering the significant amount of material that students need to study, especially if they are required to do so by multiple professors. Expecting students to scramble to find and review past assignments and readings weeks before a final exam in order to recall every detail from an entire semester, rather than concentrating on current material, is counterproductive. 

Midterm exams are already designed to assess students on the content covered in the first half of the semester. Therefore, a cumulative final exam is redundant, repetitive and unnecessarily time consuming, as they require students to be re-evaluated on content they have already been tested on.

While final exams can work in favor of some students by boosting their grade, they can have the opposite effect on those who did not do so well in their midterms. For that reason, there is no need to burden students with additional pressure by revisiting content they have already been assessed on in addition to new material. 

Without cumulative finals, students would experience less burnout, decreased stress and anxiety related to cramming a semester’s worth of information into a short amount of time, more opportunities to participate in and actually enjoy activities meant to take a student’s mind off worrying about finals and they would be less concerned about calculating their final grades in class. 

The key to successfully navigating finals week and preventing students from experiencing extreme burnout while maintaining their grades is to implement non-cumulative final exams. By introducing this type of final assessment in most, if not all classes, students would not have to experience the stress of “surviving” finals week, as this alternative approach would be more manageable