Christmas time is usually most people’s favorite time of year with the lights, trees, carols, snow and festivities.

For students, this is one of the most dreaded times of the year because as Christmas approaches, finals are also approaching.

Finals are accumulative tests that test the student’s knowledge of their understanding of the material from the whole semester.

As a bonus to studying a semester’s worth of information, students also are faced with last-minute papers and projects.

“Finals make me feel really stressed right before the holidays and take away from time that I believe should be spent with family during this season,” said Drew Gunville, NDA sophomore.

“Finals makes me pretty stressed out, and they end up affecting my family. They make everyone really uptight since I get so emotional and irritable,” said Claire Edgar, NDA sophomore.

The last-minute cramming of material for every class can be exhausting, but it doesn’t just stop at 3:15 p.m.

When students get home from school, it’s back to the books and computer doing homework, studying, writing a paper or conducting a last-minute project.

“The end of the semester makes me feel overwhelmed and frustrated,” said Katie Kulick, NDA sophomore.

The end of the semester can be stressful, overwhelming and, overall, a student’s worst nightmare.

However, some schools have made a policy where students do not have to take final exams if they have a B- or higher in the class and don’t miss more than a certain number of days in the school.

Results have shown that students try harder in school and attendance increases due to this policy.

“I think I would try a lot harder if I didn’t have to take an exam if I had a good grade in the class. Instead of having to study hard for a few weeks, I would work decently hard all year instead,” said Gunville.

“I definitely would try harder in school if I didn’t have to take finals,” said Kulick.

Marinette High School has a policy where you can exempt half of your exams one semester and the other half the second semester, as long as you don’t exceed the number of days you’re allowed to be absent.

Even this change in the finals policy would help an enormous amount with the stress of the end of the semester.

All finals truly do for students is stress them out, cause them to be exhausted since they are staying up late every night studying and cause them to dislike school.