This week, if you walk around the junior high campus, you’ll see students frantically studying for cumulative finals in all of their core classes, trying to remember math formulas, cell structures, and capitals of obscure nation states learned back in September.
“I’m literally on flashcard 100,” said Stella Bastos ‘30.
One of the issues is that junior high students do not have midterms, which means we don’t have a mid-year check to make sure we know information from first semester.
Recently, teachers and administrators have been debating whether or not we should have midterms in junior high. Even though it might make studying for finals easier, some also worry it could add stress in December.
In fact, according to a recent poll of 75 seventh and eighth grade students, 67.9% think that midterms would make school more stressful while 21.8% think that midterms would prepare them for high school. We think, with experience, these opinions will change.
Some people worry seventh and eighth graders are not ready to have two big exams. However, we think that midterms would give us sort of a “checkpoint” for the year, ultimately decreasing our stress. Midterms can be a wake-up call for students who are struggling. They help you realize you need to change your study habits before it’s too late, preventing a bad surprise on final exams. “They could give us a chance to bump up our grades,” said Sofia Fernandez ‘31.
Caroline Laselle ‘31, a student from Gulliver, a school that gives midterms in junior high, said, “Midterms helped me study for finals because I already knew the dynamic, and I knew half of what to expect on the exam.”
The big question is how much stress midterms will cause and whether this amount of stress is healthy. The Cleveland Clinic states, “A little anxiety can keep you alert and hypervigilant. In the right situations, that helps keep you safe, but then, there’s the downside of the curve. When you become too overwhelmed or anxious, it interferes with your performance.”
As many of us are feeling overwhelmed and anxious right now, we think it is clear that midterms will actually decrease our stress.
But it’s important to note that stress isn’t the only factor to consider. One potential problem with midterms is finding the time to review and take them at the end of first semester. Teachers would need to find time to do this right before Christmas break and that means they would have to speed up the curriculum so that we’d have time to study and time to physically take the test. For students, this would mean we would have to learn at a faster pace so that we could still learn everything we needed to learn.
However, we think that if 9-12 grade can do it, so can we. “We would be following the 9-12 grade schedule because we are part of the Upper School,” said Upper School geography teacher Mrs. Carratala.
That brings us to our final point. We can’t avoid midterms forever. “Midterms would be a little more stressful, but [they] would prepare us for high school,” said Fernandez.
In our opinion, midterms would provide many benefits for students. Even though they could cause some anxiety, we believe that they would give us much more room to make mistakes, prepare us for tests and exams in the future, and help us learn to deal with anxiety in a healthy way. Midterms would change how the junior high works for the better.
