Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums High School Exams, before or after break?

If your high school has mid-year exams, and if your school has a long break in December, are the exams before or after the break?

Or, does your high school not have mid-year exams? Discuss!

The local public high school has exams at the end of January. The private high school my kids went to has exams right before winter break.

Here, it is totally class and teacher specific, no set rules or pattern. I don't think DD had many mid-terms, one in AP world history before the break that I remember, but that's it. Our second marking period (of four) ends near the end of January; there seem to be exams in many classes just before the end of the marking period, but they are usually not midterms or cumulative, at least not in our experience.

Our state, NY, does hold regents exams mid-year, after the break here (but regents exams are final exams, not mid-terms, so I assume these are for kids who are taking make-up exams or are off the typical year-long sequence for some other reason- no personal experience here.)

After break. DS has exams in one more week. Last year finals weren't till Feb but up district pushed up their start data to late August and gave us fewer days off in the fall this year.

So does NY count classes in year or semesters?

Here in CA public schools (from the ones I know) a kid gets credit for a complete semester (1/2 years) of work. There are finals at the end of every semester. Certain classes don't have finals like band, but even classes like English have a final exam even if it's not worth a lot. Too big a deal is made of finals IMO. In our district finals can be max 15% of your grade and some classes it only counts for 10%.

It's units of credit, with a 40 week course generally earning one unit of credit (the definition of a unit of credit is specified by 180 minutes of instruction per week throughout the year, or an equivalent.) Just happened to have the course catalog out...