Midterm Stress

 It's mid January and all of a sudden your required to flashback to all the knowledge you have learned since August.  I don't know about you, but I struggle trying to think back to what I had for breakfast this morning, none the less what I learned back in August.  But, no matter what students do this every year twice a year until they finish their education experience.

Whether in college or high school, every year midterms and finals linger over students as a huge impact to the final grade achieved in every class. 

Talk about stressful.  Take one week, put all the classed you have taken over the semester and all the knowledge learned in those classes, and take a test on that material.  It is possibly the most stressful and haunting week throughout your school career.  Endless hours of studying, stressing and panicking over whether your going to pass or fail the test.  It's a student's worst nightmare and never seems to stop.  As soon as one exam week ends preparation for the next ones start the day after with the start of the next semester.

My question is why make students take finals and midterms when after the end of the material being learned a unit test is already administered.  Students are already tested to find out whether they know the material or not so why add the stress of testing them again.  But, this time add the stress of every unit learned piled into one unmanageable test compacted on with every other class doing the same exact thing. 

I'm not advocating against tests, but I am saying why assign midterms and finals when it is a well known fact students don't perform well under stress.  Finals place students under such stress with the lingering fact of a possible grade drop with a bad grade on the exams. 

Although a recap of material is beneficial to students, students should not be expected with all the different classes and knowledge they obtain every school day to remember every nitty- gritty detail all at once.  Finals are a recipe for stress and disaster because no ones memory can retain as much information as the exams require.