Montgomery County Public Schools have replaced exams with Required Quarterly Assessments (RQA). This replacement is not helping students prepare for college, but instead withholding kids for later on in life.

Montgomery County Public Schools should bring back exams and take away the RQAs. Final exams did not count towards students’ quarter grades in the same way that RQAs do. Final exams would not impact their final quarterly grades like RQAs, making finals more favored by students.

RQAs for most classes aren’t even at the end of the quarter, they usually take place halfway through the quarter which means they are not assessing students about the whole entire quarter, while exams assess you on the whole semester. Exam week allowed students to study more for their exam because they would have one to two exams a day if they weren’t elective classes.

In college students are given exam week and by replacing it with the RQAs, the upcoming middle school students and the current freshmen will not know how to prepare themselves for exam week in college. The RQAs are a shorter type of test that also gives less time than the exams while covering less information.

RQAs are part of your quarterly grades, meaning if you get a low grade on one of the RQAs, it could potentially bring down your grade in the class. Not to mention if you get a higher grade on the test it does not do much for your grade besides raising it up by about a point.

Exams have all the information built up from what students are taught throughout their year from each quarter, while RQAs are every quarter and they only hold a small proportion of the unit in the test. Some may find RQAs easier than exams but a lot of students tend to not care about RQAs as much as exams because they are only ten percent of your quarterly grade.

Montgomery County Public Schools should bring back exam week and take away RQAs to prepare their students for their future in college and also give students a chance at getting a better grade in their classes.