Students from the Norwich Free Academy have to take midterm and final exams, usually during January and June. While we understand these exams prepare us for college, there are more cons than pros. The only pro is preparing you for college. The cons include tons of stress on students and time needed to develop exams by teachers. Students are thrown into a position where if they receive a poor grade on their midterm, their semester grade will suffer as well. This is unfair, because the exam covers half a year and requires many hours of studying and preparing to relearn everything taught throughout the year. Some people, are bad test takers, and have frequent anxiety attacks and other issues that cause them to second guess themselves and score poorly on tests. Final exams are a large part of your grade, and somebody who has a B+ and deserves it, but then scores an F on the exam will see a dramatic drop in their grade because of 2 hours of testing. Teachers also need to develop exams and make sure that they cover everything. This makes it so that if some teachers were unable to cover certain topics for undisclosed reasons, they are forced to try to jam in a lesson at the end of the year when they should be reviewing for the big test. The cons outweigh the pros in this situation. Many teachers also disagree with exams as well, and do not enjoy giving them. We are not proposing to not have anything at the end of the year, but we think that exams are not the way to go with students at NFA. Please sign this petition and spread the word so that your voices can be heard.