Midterms, the week halfway through the year, which creates dread and over-stress for many students. The real purpose of midterms is to prepare us for college and show if we have learned what we were supposed to throughout the first half of the year. But they aren’t even a fair representation of that, they just show how much information we can cram into our heads the week before we take the test.
Midterms are supposed to prepare you for college, and what college exam schedules are like, but college exams aren’t even really comparable to midterms in high school. At South, we get 90 minutes to apply all the information you have learned from September to January into one exam. To add on to that, many students have to do this for seven classes in one week. In college, you usually get longer than 90 minutes and tests spaced out over two to three weeks for all your classes.
An article from The Rensselaer Polytechnic, a university newspaper, explains that though taking a test worth 600 points of one’s term grade was equally, if not more stressful than midterms and finals, the fact that they were not scheduled within one jam-packed week made them more tolerable. Instead of having to cram for multiple, heavily-weighted exams, there are only one or two major exams amongst other normally weighted ones. This probably doesn’t help with the fact that, when studying for midterms, a lot of students learning the information needed for the midterms are just memorizing what they need to get a good grade and are not actually taking in the information that they should be.
Midterms take up 20 percent of your grade, which is a lot. Not all students are good test takers, so for them, these tests aren’t even a good measure of whether they really understand the material, and may possibly tank their grade. Granted, some finals in college are tests, too, but not all of them. A lot of times, you have to write papers or do projects, and even for the finals that are tests, you get way more time to study for them than we get as high schoolers. Projects and papers make it more fair for the students who aren’t good test takers. I also think they are a better measure of whether you understood the material you learned all semester long, because you have to explain the information you have been learning.
Not only are high school midterms exhausting, overly stressful, dreaded and mentally draining, but they really don’t even do what they are supposed to do in the long run in or in a way that works well. They are not a fair representation of whether we have learned the needed material that we should have. Overall, there probably could be better ways to test our knowledge than the stereotypical midterm tests that we always have to take.
