There’s only one way to describe the weeks leading up to midterms and finals: stressful. Students and teachers alike spend day and night preparing for these semester exams, but more recently, some teachers have been opting for project-based midterms instead of daunting tests.
The process of project midterms has both pros and cons for both students and teachers, such as math teacher Amanda Orban.
“When I first took up my statistics class, it was structured to have a project midterm, so that was my first experience with it,” Orban said. “The projects are a really good summarization of the whole class, so that helps students complete them, which also helps me grade them.”
Even though projects are the best fit for some of Orban’s classes, she admits that other classes need to have test midterms in order to cover all of the key concepts. It all just depends on what Orban needs to make sure her students understand, and what her past lesson plans have been.
“Some subjects I teach are pretty black and white, like algebra, so I need to do tests to cover everything we learned that semester,” Orban said. “But projects show me a more conceptual understanding of everything [students] know, so when it makes sense with the curriculum, I try to do a project.”
Outside of the academic pros, project midterms can also help eliminate some stress that students experience around the end of the second quarter. Projects allow students like Violet King ’26 the opportunity to prepare ahead of time and focus on specific details of the curriculum instead of memorization.
“What I prefer honestly just depends on the class, but normally I like projects more,” King said. “Sometimes they can be hard to stay on top of, but I use the rubric my teachers give me to plan what I need to do when, and that helps me stay on track.”
On the other hand, Madeline Maks ’26 prefers tests over products because she finds them to have a stronger structure than projects. With this structure, Maks has an easier time preparing, and in the end, succeeding on them.
“I’m more confident taking tests than I am presenting, because I have a schedule I use to study for them, and I know it works well for me,” Maks said. “I also like that with tests. I tend to get back my grades faster, which helps me avoid the stress I get while waiting for my grades.”
Both tests and projects have their pros and cons, but King believes preference is determined by what works best for people, how people learn, and what methods are easiest for them to comprehend.
