Congratulations, freshpeople! You have made it to the end of your first semester of college! To finish it, you just have one more obstacle to overcome—
Finals.
I know this is your first experience with college-level final exams, but they really aren’t that different from high school finals. Here are some things you should know before finals week:
1. Your finals will be on a designated time and place, and you will have two hours to complete them: The finals schedule is on the Blackboard login page (https://blackboard.wvwc.edu/), below where you type in your username and password.
2. Some final exams are comprehensive, some are not: If you don’t know yet whether or not your final will be comprehensive, ask your professor.
3. Some classes don’t have final exams: Hopefully your professors will have told you by now whether you will have a test, a project, an essay, or nothing at all. If your class does not have a final exam, then your final project/essay may not be due when your final will have been (according to the schedule). Make sure you know when all your end-of-semester assignments are due.
4. If you have three finals on one day, you are allowed to request that one be moved: The school can only require you to take two finals on the same day, so if you are scheduled for three, ask your professors if one of them will let you take their final on a different day. If none of them volunteer to move their final, then you can talk to the administration, and they’ll help you out.
5. Some colleges have Dead Week. We have Reading Day: Reading Day is the Thursday between the last day of classes and the first day of finals, which means that Reading Day is free for you to use it however you need to. Most people spend Reading Day in the library, cramming for their Friday finals, but Reading Day is also often used for organization or departmental celebrations or last minute-meetings.
6. Finals are not as scary as they seem! We always stress out and tell horror stories about finals, but in the end, they are rarely as bad as we make them out to be. Study and work hard, and finals will be a breeze!
Good luck, freshpeople! You’ve got this!