As finals have come to an end, the first semester classes at Woodbridge High School have already prepared and taken their finals. Preparing for the finals is a process every class goes through, but how exactly did they this year: did classes incorporate Chromebooks into their studying or final exam?

Finals this year were held on the two half days on the 30th and 31st of January.

Mr. Switek, an English teacher at WHS said some things about the use of Chromebooks in his Sophomore English Honors class. He said that to study for the final he did use online tools/resources.

He said he used “the online textbook and the exam review [was] posted on Google Classroom”. As for using Chromebooks during the final, he was “undecided”. However, he said, “using Chromebooks for essays and short answer questions is advantageous so students can use spell check and other tools”.

Mr. Switek said that he agrees that schools should begin doing finals on Chromebooks similar to PARCC, but “for written answers”. The only risk he said was that students could “share answers among peers with a shared Google [Document]”.

Mr. Chittum is another teacher that conducted finals; the class was Web Google and Beyond. He had his kids use the desktop computers for studying for the finals. He used Google Classroom with them on “a daily basis”.

He said he “suggest[s]” that all students and teachers use online resources when it comes to preparing for the finals.

Julia Chepel, a Sophomore at WHS said that she prepared for her finals in Algebra 2, Chemistry, and Drivers Ed. She prepared with an online resource tool called Quizlet. She also used “practice tests on Google Classroom”.

As for using Chromebooks for actual finals, she thinks it would have been “useful for some classes” and that they are “sometimes easier”.

Ikmat Ibrahim, a senior at WHS who will be graduating this year also took finals this semester. Her classes were SUPA and AP courses. The only class she had a final in was SUPA Presentational Speaking. She said that she prepared with Quizlet as well. She used it for flashcards since her final was only on vocabulary.

She did not take her final on the Chromebook and that she was fine with that; she said that “[she is] fine with traditional questions”.

Ikmat also said that the only way teachers could begin to allow students to take their finals on Chromebook is by “teachers [making] different forms of the online test to avoid cheating”. If teachers were to do this, then she would have been fine with taking the test on Chromebook.

As finals came to the first semester classes, students and teachers used all the online resources they could to prepare, thanks to the Chromebooks. Now the next semester classes have commenced and students and teachers are situating themselves.