The end of the year is a busy time. AP tests take up two full weeks, and finals take up a good deal of the last week. However, people are generally too stressed to pay attention to how much time they really have during the end of the year. Though there is a state mandated number of school days, if you take the time to look at the schedule, it would eliminate a lot of overhead and wasted time to actually scale the school year back a week.

The upperclassmen spend the AP weeks struggling to make it through and then relax the rest of the year. Finals in AP classes are either non-existent or designed to be a relaxing place-filler, and the last two weeks of school for AP students (and thus most of the upper class) are essentially blow-off time.

That being the case, there seems like a compromise could succeed with timing. Free time at the end of the school year is never a bad thing, but a slightly more cramped schedule is worth it for extra summer and I think many students would agree. With both upper and lowerclassmen having lulls in their school time and end-of-year preparation, there shouldn’t be any real groups that are left out of the benefits.

If we were to take one week out after the AP tests and compress review and finals into a single week, we could end a week earlier while performing just as well. AP weeks are essentially a review period for lower classmen anyway, and the week afterwards gives time to complete finals for AP students that have non-AP finals classes.

This eliminates a lot of the breaks in action during the finals week as well. Finals week is sparse in actual testing. Even if your schedule is full of testing, you will be left going back to a class you already took a final in. This doesn’t make much logistical sense and there are enough spaces in finals testing to compress the finals into three days without sacrificing actual test time.

Therefore we would be taking out finals week and compressing the week after AP testing to two review days and three finals days. Finals being approximately two hours tops, this means we can have three finals on Wednesday and Thursday and then allow Friday to still be a half-day as is tradition. This would get tests over with quicker, still allow for free time, and get us out a week sooner for summer without having to start school earlier to go with it.