By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed.
Many high school teachers and college professors assign final projects instead of final exams. Teachers and professors may choose a final project over an exam for several reasons. First, it may fit the subject better. Second, they want to see if students understand the content deeply. Finally, projects let them assess creative skills that exams often miss.
There are pros and cons to being assigned a final project, many of which are subjective and depend on your preferences as a student.
But let me make one thing clear: Final projects are not guaranteed to be easier than final exams. Many professors and teachers grade final projects more strictly because the standard is higher.
In this blog post, I’m giving you five strategies to get an A on final projects.
5 Tips to Help You Get an A on Final Projects
Using any of the following strategies can boost your final project grade. But if you really want to get an A on your final project, try to implement all five.
(Bonus Tip: You can also use the following strategies to ace any project, not just your final project.)
1. Get Organized Before You Start
One of the easiest ways to sabotage a final project is by being disorganized from the start. Before you even dive into the content, take 15 minutes to set yourself up. Create a folder (digital or physical) just for this project. Put the rubric, instructions, your brainstorm notes, drafts, research, and feedback all in the folder. Label everything clearly.
If your project involves visuals, essays, or multimedia components, keep each part organized by file type and version, like “draft_essay_v1” and “final_presentation_slides.”
This step may seem simple, but people often skip it. When they do, things get lost, deadlines creep up, and projects can feel too overwhelming.
2. Obsess Over the Rubric
Read the rubric multiple times. Don’t just glance over it — study it. Before you begin your project, make sure you fully understand how you’re being graded. If anything in the rubric is unclear, ask your teacher or professor to clarify.
Then, as you work through each stage of the project, refer back to the rubric to check your progress. Treat the rubric like a checklist. Literally go line by line to make sure you hit every criterion. For example, if you can earn a 5/5 for “Grammar and Mechanics” in your final written project, make darn sure there isn’t a single grammar error on what you turn in.
And when you’re done with your final draft, use the rubric one last time to self-assess before you submit the project.
3. Start Earlier Than You Want To
Final projects almost always have multiple steps, so waiting until the last day will create stress you don’t need. You can avoid this stress by starting early and mapping out your project timeline.
For example, your final project may include three parts: a visual expression of a common theme of all the books you read in your literature class, an essay about your visual creation, and an oral presentation explaining your analysis and process. That’s three different tasks, each requiring its own time, energy and resources. Don’t treat it like one single project, or you’ll get overwhelmed.
If your teacher hasn’t already broken the project into parts, do it yourself. How? Break the project down into smaller steps and put each step on your calendar. (Need help? Here’s the best way to start a school project step-by-step so you don’t get overwhelmed.)
Using the example from above, that might look like the following:
- A. Monday: Sketch the visual part of the project.
- B. Tuesday: Finalize the visual part of the project.
- C. Wednesday-Friday: write and edit the essay part of the project (here are my best tips for editing your own essays)
- D. Saturday: Draft the slides for the presentation.
- E. Sunday: Finalize the slides.
This structure makes a big project feel more manageable.
4. Take Advantage of All Feedback Opportunities
Many professors offer to provide feedback at certain points leading up to the final project’s deadline. You should take advantage of every single opportunity like this.
For example, if your final project is an essay, your professor may offer to review your thesis early on in the process. If your final project is a website prototype for a digital media class, your professor might offer to give feedback on your wireframes or design mockups. Use these opportunities. Not only will it improve your project, but it also shows initiative, and teachers notice that.
If your teacher or professor doesn’t offer a chance to provide feedback, you can always take that initiative yourself. Reach out and see if they’ll meet with you, and then show up to the meeting fully prepared to ask specific questions.
Bonus Resource: How to Accept Feedback
5. Always Incorporate Key Themes
In most literature, civics, philosophy, history, and humanities courses, your curriculum will focus on a certain number of key themes.
For example, if you’re taking a Gothic literature course in college, you may read seven Gothic novels. Each novel will explore critical Gothic literature themes such as death, darkness, the supernatural and isolation.
If you’re taking a philosophy course, you may study 20 different philosophers, but chances are that you’re going to cover the key themes of ethics, values and morality, as well as frameworks for thinking about what’s right and wrong or moral versus immoral.
If you’re taking an economics course, you’re going to study a lot of nitty-gritty economic principles and frameworks, but most of those frameworks are going to fit under the themes of input, output, scarcity, and opportunity cost.
When you’re working on your final projects, always come back to the core course themes and incorporate them into your project as much as possible.
The reason you should always come back to course themes is that it shows your professor that you understood the big ideas of the course, not just the surface-level content. For example, if you’re in that Gothic literature course, and your project includes an analysis of how death and isolation manifest in each of the novels studied — using both textual evidence and creative expression — then you’ve demonstrated thematic mastery, not just project completion.
A Critical Point About Final Projects
The bottom line is that your final project should show your teacher or professor that you understand the content and can apply it. You can do something with it. You can create something new from it.
In reality, a final exam that consists of only multiple-choice questions doesn’t really show how well a student understands the material. Multiple-choice tests only assess a student’s ability to recognize correct answers when they’re presented with them.
On the other hand, a well-designed final project assignment measures a student’s comprehension of material in a much deeper way. It reveals how well you can synthesize complex ideas, structure your thinking, and present your understanding in a way that’s thoughtful and original.
It’s your teacher‘s job to design the final projects properly, and it’s your job as a student to make sure that what you submit fully represents what you learned from the course. When you approach your final project with strategy, organization, and a focus on the big ideas, you’re not just completing an assignment — you’re demonstrating mastery. And it’s mastery that gets you an A.
