Like clockwork, the midterm season seems to arrive by the time you just got settled into your new semester routine. Just after your classes begin to pick up in difficulty and course load, your professors rush to give you a big exam or cumulative quiz to test you on what you’ve learned before the mid-point of the semester. Since all the midterm grades are usually due on a specific day, you’re often being bombarded with exams within the same week, occasionally on the same day.
If you have ever had a professor who is slow to grade assignments, you understand the anxiety that comes from the next couple of days or weeks after finishing an exam or project. If you’re not sure you are understanding the material correctly, you won’t know for sure until you get your results back, and who knows how long that could take? You better hope it’s before the midterms, or else you’re getting handed a huge exam about topics you haven’t received graded feedback for yet.
Especially with general education courses, midterm exams seem to line up during the same week each semester. If you have back-to-back classes on any individual day, you’re stuck with studying for two or more exams for the same day with no break in between, increasing the amount of time dedicated to performing well – or at the very least, just enough to pass.
With all the stress, studying, and work being put into such a short window of time during the semester, it makes you wonder how necessary this is and how much it should actually affect a student’s academic standing when placed under so much stress.
I believe traditional midterm exams as we know them should be changed. The most applicable and relatable reason as a college student would be the academic and mental stress that midterm exams place on students, especially since midterm exams are often grouped together with each other in the same week. So much pressure on a student in a short period of time can quickly lead to burnout, sleep deprivation, and lower test scores.
If midterm exams were made more flexible in form, they could reduce the mental and physical toll that midterm season has on students.
Now, not all courses have a “true” midterm exam. Some classes, especially specific single-section courses for upperclassmen or general aesthetics courses, run on different schedules than others and give the students different responsibilities compared to a typical class environment. For example, some theatre or dance courses will assign you a routine or script to follow, and your “exam” will be a performance that you are graded on, instead of the typical pencil-and-paper written test.
Incorporating interactive, hands-on assessments into a course as an alternative to a midterm exam could increase test scores and allow for more knowledge retention, according to a study led by Prof. Sian Beilock from the University of Chicago. The flexibility of this alternative allows itself to be molded into forms suitable for most, if not all, course types. While dance and theatre courses could use plays or performances, business classes can have product proposals like an episode of “Shark Tank,” and science classes can bring students out into the field to collect their own samples. And if students get tested on these concepts later in the semester, they’ll have real-world examples to pull from.
If we would rather stick to the usual written exams, allowing them to be open-book or open-note can allow for less cramming of academic material before midterms. Additionally, having textbooks or notes allowed for an exam allows professors to test students on higher-order cognitive thinking concepts, rather than simpler, lower-level questions fitted for a closed-note exam that don’t dive too deep into material, which can cause students to forget what they’ve learned when going into the second half of the semester if they don’t truly understand the concepts.
That way, open-book exams ensure students aren’t cramming for a good grade; it makes sure they’re able to rely on their own notes and not just their memory.
Finally, the timing of midterm season is usually just before the withdrawal deadline for classes by a couple of weeks. If a student scores a bad midterm grade, it may push them to withdraw from a class, or risk receiving a failing grade if they don’t believe they can improve for final exams.
Instead of having one big test in the middle of the semester to gauge academic standing in the class, breaking up tests into pieces over the span of a couple weeks throughout the semester, or reducing the weight of a midterm test, can allow some leeway for students to improve their grade.
Higher education has changed in many ways over the past decades, and so many things have improved from when our parents and grandparents went to college. Just like how educators and students have collaborated to improve our learning environments, class experiences, and education accessibility, we can improve our midterm examination methods, too.
