Whats the point of Finals..?

So as a junior in high school, like previous years, with the end of a semester brings another set of final exams. Its often debated if around a quarter of a student's grade should be measured on 90 minutes of tricky multiple choice questions and rushed essays, testing time management rather than knowledge.

The fact of the matter is that in the real world, you are nearly never given an hour to complete a task and no longer do you have to crank out an essay that you end up regretting what you wrote right after leaving the testing room. If you cant
 
A semester grade, in my mind should reflect overall performance. This means that if you have one bad test or assignment, it shouldn't affect your overall grade. Who knows, you could have forgotten to study, or just been having a bad day which leads to you not performing at your best during a test.

It seems as if teachers don't like to give out finals also. More often than not, teachers that I have had in the past seem to dread grading finals and would rather just give a multiple choice test to make their job easy and so that they don't spend a bunch of days grading exams.

No one likes taking finals. It is very stressful for the students, and sometimes annoying for the teachers. I think that final grades should rather be taken into account of a semester of the student. Participation seems to directly undermine assignments and final grades tend to only reflect the work on tests, which accounts for maybe one day every two weeks of class work.

Using the Media for some good

In 2007, Dutch television station BNN hosted a fantastic hoax of a TV show that reached almost all of Holland. The premise of the show was to take one terminally ill person and have 25 other kidney needing candidates to plead their case as to why they should get the kidney.  Hundreds of thousands of Hollanders (is that a word?) watched the show and it created a huge buzz.

The Show took a turn for the best when it was announced that everyone involved was actor and the show attempted to persuade watchers to, "that people need to take action now and fill in a donor card." (source). Too often are kidneys and other vital organs not available and Holland isn't the only country that seems to be suffering from lack of donors.

A pretty big medical problem in America is a lack of donors for vital organs. Kidney Link, a website to match donors with people in need of kidneys proved that, "people wait several years for a good match" (source). Several years is an incredible amount of time to suffer from either pain or go through more years of dialysis and all the struggles provided with that.

In this instance, the media/television was used to educate. It drew in viewers with an incredibly clever ploy and BNN (the tv company) was able to educate a substantial amount of people and do a good thing for the community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttri_GOSMcY--- ***Here is the link to the final 8 mins of the show and the announcment that goes along with it, English subtitles can be turned on***

Social Class Sends You to Jail?

Social class can determine many different things. The current prison makeup, with over 50% of prisoners being African American doesn't seem to show how only 6% of the population is African American (source). There seems to be a big connection on socioeconomic status (SES) and the criminal justice system. So why is it that people of lower SES tend to go to prison more often?

One reason, and the most well known reasons is due to money. People with more money can pay for the best lawyers that can negotiate the best deals. It also would not be a stretch to say that people with more money live in neighborhoods with people of similar wealth and thus, people in trouble with the law could use connections from their community and neighborhood to get them out of trouble.

The graph above accurately describes the divide of how many black individuals go to prison compared to other races. From the stat mentioned above, black individuals are only 6% of the population and it seems crazy to see that they almost triple the numbers of other races as seen in the graph above.

In your mind, Is social class a means for sending more people to jail?