The annual added stress, pressure and anxiety rolls around before you know it. With Christmas break approaching also comes the start of the preparation for midterm semester exams. Students are cramming in last-minute work to get grades as high as possible while also balancing time to study for upcoming midterms which affect 20% of your overall semester grade.
Teachers often try to cram in the last unit of the semester right before break, causing students much stress considering that final grades are finalized in less than three weeks.
On top of that, students have midterms two weeks after they come back from break, which ruins all the excitement for the much-needed Christmas break. Students can’t fully enjoy their break because the second school starts back up before we know it, it’s a week of exams.
Midterms and final exams’ relevance in today’s society have recently been questioned, especially by me. One of the more criticized topics, midterms shouldn’t exist because of the question of whether midterms are memorization-based or comprehension-based. In my opinion, these tests support short-term comprehension rather than genuine understanding.
Clearly, with all of the last-minute work students cram in, they barely have enough time to genuinely learn the material and instead rely on memorization to get through the pressure. The actual benefits midterms would be offering are immediately wiped away because there is no actual progress with learning the material.
The stress behind midterms is immense. These insanely high expectations that students are held to significantly impact their mental health and well-being that last throughout the actual test taking and affect your performance. Teachers make a huge deal to do well on these exams, which adds even more stress on top of everything teenagers have going on in their lives already.
Additionally, midterms fail to account for the different ways students learn best. Every student has a different type of learning style, whether that’s visual, auditory, read/write, etc. They try to make it as smooth as possible for themselves, and the current style of midterms just doesn’t offer any other learning options. Many think that schools need midterms to be able to evaluate where students are at the halfway point of the year, but that is the reason teachers have tests on what students learn throughout each quarter.
While midterms have always been a benchmark for assessing progress, the stress and anxiety that comes with them outshines the actual advantages, especially during this time of the year. These exams should encourage critical thinking, encourage deeper understanding, but instead, they don’t do anything but cause unnecessary stressful emotions for students.
