Midterm exams are inevitable.
The second most dreaded assessment after final exams—some may argue the most dreaded, as an entire second semester looms—come on fast. Often, during midterms, especially in Fourth and Fifth Forms, students are tasked with studying an entire semester’s worth of old material, while still learning new material and attending class. For some, this, on top of projects and papers consuming hours and hours of time, is a recipe for a nervous breakdown.
A properly designated midterm week, like that of finals week, should be implemented. A week devoted to no class, availing students of the necessary endless hours to properly study the endless piles of work. There is no difference in the amount of content contained in midterms and finals, so why are the conditions under which students must prepare so vastly different?
Fifth Former Colin Toth agrees.
“I think having a midterm week free of classes is a good idea,” he said. “We need the time to relearn the mountains of work from the first semester.”
An argument has consistently been made that teachers face pressure to get through a dense syllabus, and therefore teach right up to midterms. To that end, there is a solution.
Mental health and the price that is paid when it’s under duress cannot be underestimated.
Should students lose the war for a midterm week free from classes, then a compromise can be reached: students should only be tested on that which they have not been previously assessed. Cramming in all the old information plus learning new information doesn’t fulfill the intended result of true comprehension or more learning. If the material was previously tested, then the teacher has hit the mark of teaching the material. Students likely have also written papers and taken tests on just that content; it’s time to move on.
“It’s a lot,” remarked Fifth Former Tommy Gowen. “[It] doesn’t make a lot of sense because we end up being tested twice on old material instead of once on a shorter amount of new material.”
Not to mention, the depth of engagement will be less for new material that has never been assessed. If teachers want to assess all that students have learned and how well they’ve learned it, why not give them the opportunity to showcase exactly that? A reevaluation of both a class-free midterm week and the appropriate amount of content assessed should be considered.
Mental health and the price that is paid when it’s under duress cannot be underestimated.
