Dear Professors: Midterms are way too stressful
Midterms are raising my blood pressure and how to stop it
Ronnie Saenz / Contributor / THE USD VISTA
We find ourselves in the spring season, which is full of blooming flowers, crisp cool air, and cute little bunnies. It’s also midterm season which includes 3:00 a.m. sleep schedules, enough coffee to fill a miniature aquarium, and a slight sensation of impending doom. Midterms are an exam used to check on how much you’ve learned halfway through a class, and an important event always dreaded by my fellow students, and myself. However, I don’t think we should have to stress so much over midterms.
If the point of a midterm is to be a check up, then why is there such a big emphasis on studying? If it’s a real check up you shouldn’t have to study, it’s like taking a blood thinner right before a blood test. Except I don’t remember ever being stressed out for a blood test, other than watching the bloody needle. Yet the most common complaint I hear around midterms is stress. I stress that I won’t pass the midterm, then the class, then the semester, then the year, then I drop out, and then I die, eventually.
According to The Mayo Clinic, some of the common effects of stress are anxiety, fatigue, depression, and lack of motivation. This essentially means that stress created from these tests actually fuels more problems for future learning. It doesn’t help that most midterms are immediately after spring break which means you’re expected to study during the break or remember what you studied over a week ago. This year all my exams were after spring break, and I was much more confident for the exams a week before the break unlike the ones immediately after the break. I personally cannot find the motivation to study over the break because I am not a hard working student 100% of the time. I want to enjoy my break, and if I study the week before, it’s harder to retain that information, so I always end up studying the week of, even if the midterm is that Monday, which is essentially cramming.
 The post-midterm stress is just as serious. I am personally catching up with a class after taking its midterm, and it is taking the life out of me. I’ve been in the library for late night study sessions, I am constantly working on extra credit, and I am studying more consistently; but, this has all been awful for me as I’m literally falling asleep at the wheel in the morning.
I’m experiencing the symptoms The Mayo Clinic described, on top of extraordinary burnout, and I know I’m not the only one. The problem is that there is too much pressure around midterms because they’re weighted pretty substantially and can actually weigh as much as a final in some of my classes. According to a 2007 study from researchers at the University of California, San Diego and the University of South Florida, concerning the impact of learning too much at once, cramming the day before an exam is more effective than studying less material over a week at getting a good exam grade. However, once tested on the same material later the study found the two groups performed about the same. So, if learning everything at once is not beneficial to learning, then how is testing everything at once a good indicator of what you’ve learned? For a procrastinator such as myself, having exams that test you on big chunks of information creates a habit of studying everything a few days before an exam that tests a few weeks’ worth of material.
When giving out midterms maybe don’t weigh them the same as a final (you are testing half the material after all). I suggest having weekly chapter quizzes because personally these will allow me to learn the material more thoroughly. Maybe even consider getting rid of the midterm altogether by replacing them with much more manageable weekly quizzes. Just remember that when writing your next syllabus, students don’t like intense stress. Regular stress is just fine, thank you.