Every year, seniors look forward to an exciting week: the week leading up to prom. Many South seniors make extravagant up-north trips the night of prom for the weekend, since historically, senior skip day takes place the Monday after prom weekend. Allowing seniors to stay up-north for an extended period of time.

However, with the early release of seniors this year, many weekend plans have been altered because senior skip day falls the day before finals, filled with crucial exam reviews that could be detrimental to many seniors’ final grades if missed.

However, Cate Hampton ’24 said she’s not worried about the change in finals because she takes mainly AP classes, resulting in earlier finals or project finals. Therefore, none of her finals or senior skip day are detrimental to her grades.

“I’m not going to stress myself out about it, because nothing really affects my grade or acceptance into college that much anymore, and my only real final is math which has been pretty simple this year,” Hampton said.

Math teacher Katherine Barbour said she wants to set the seniors up for success and not stress them out on their senior skip day. She encourages students to use the week leading up to finals to study before the stressful prom weekend. She said seniors should focus on getting their grades up this quarter so that the final will hardly affect their final GPA.

“I encourage students to have good grades in quarter four so that if they don’t do well on the final exam, it won’t affect their grades too negatively,” Barbour said, “(I) also make sure students use the week before super wisely and get their questions answered as well as utilize their time to have their notecards finished.

Keira Collins ’24 said she knows her finals will boost grades because she already knows how to study efficiently and quickly. When she is up north after prom for the weekend, she won’t have to do much studying.

“I was gone the weekend before midterms, so I really had to learn how to manage my time quickly and well,” Collins said, “I worked really hard the week leading up to midterms so that I could relax the weekend I was gone, so I’m not worried about being gone before finals and would rather prioritize time with my friends over my last grades that aren’t crucial.”

Although the timing of prom is already stressful, having seniors skip the review day before finals is seemingly not crucial to many seniors’ grades, especially with the teachers moving around lesson plans so the seniors can have their day off.

“All of our PLCs have organized our calendar in a way so that Monday is not a part of our calendar for anything that is detrimental to their grades so that the seniors can enjoy their day off,” Barbour said.