Semester finals week for Tahoma students just ended on Jan 26, 2024. Finals are always difficult and they take a lot of time and preparation if a student wants to perform well. In this article, we are going to conduct interviews with Tahoma students to better understand what the everyday student needs to keep in mind when the next finals week comes around.
The main question we want answered when conducting our research is, “what mistakes do you feel you made when preparing for your final exams?”
Here is what people had to say when we asked them this question. Kenneth Wahl, a Tahoma High School senior said, “the mistakes I made were procrastinating until the very last second to study. Even waiting until power hour to start studying the topics.”
Another student we talked to was Sean Olsen, a running start student at Green River College, we can take good input from Sean because he is in harder classes than the regular high school student. Sean said he felt the mistakes he made were “not studying and not going through the course preparing notes for a future test.” These examples can be broken down into two things, procrastination and not studying. These two things are seen in many other examples we collected.
The last three people we spoke to were all THS juniors. Beckam Reis said, “I regret not giving myself enough time to study, I waited until the last second and that was a mistake.”
Randall Hassinger stated, “I just procrastinated too much, even when I would sit down to study I found myself doing other things.”
Alberto Nunez, the last person we spoke to said the mistakes he made were “not being a conscientious worker.” A conscientious worker is someone who puts effort into their work, paying attention to detail and making sure they do everything right.
As you can see from all our examples there are a couple of large mistakes that most people make when preparing for final exams. The first one is procrastination, delaying the things you need to do in order to be prepared, like putting off studying or homework until the very last minute. Procrastination was a mistake for all these students as it resulted in them not having the time they needed to get prepared.
The second big mistake was not studying, mostly referring to Sean Olsen, he felt like it was not necessary to study, but after reflecting on his experience he realized that it was actually a detriment to his success.
The third and final example we can take away is not being a conscientious worker. It is important that when you are studying you are doing so diligently and with the intent to remember what you are learning.
To summarize, The big three things you can do to make smart choices when preparing for your next final exams are to study, start studying days or weeks in advance, and make sure you are being a conscientious worker.
