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Surviving midterms

As you’re reading these lines, other students are celebrating the survival of midterms week. You have solved equations, discussed complicated theories, held conversations in foreign languages and lived to tell the tale. Congratulations! But what does it mean to “survive” an exam?

About a week ago I talked to a friend, asking him how he was doing. “Not great,” he said. “I’m really stressed about my econ class.” But this friend loves his econ class. Why would he be stressed? “It doesn’t matter how much I love econ,” he explained. “What matters is what grade I get on the exam.”

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His response seemed intuitively wrong. When we face an exam, even in a field we truly love, our stress sometimes eclipses our enjoyment of the subject matter. Clarifying his thoughts, he explained that his post-graduation prospective career opportunities hinge on good grades. I understand this concern: we live in a world that values objective measures of worth. However, I take issue with the way Princeton seems to encourage its students to view examinations.

Any one of the more than 450 students currently enrolled in COS 126: General Computer Science can attest to the great joy experienced last week when told there would be no assignment due during midterms week. But not only that! In an email, computer science professor Robert Sedgewick informed us that we would have no lectures and that one of our precepts would be cancelled. To all students who had numerous other exams and projects on their minds, this seemed like a blessing. However, I was left wondering if this decision made any pedagogical sense.

Educational experiences of all forms benefit greatly from a continuity in the acquisition of different parts of the material studied. The different concepts, especially in computer science, all complement one another. A break in this continuity might, then, harm the quality of the educational experience. In the case of COS 126, the instructors were molding their class around the examination schedule, instead of the other way around. And this is not an isolated case. Throughout this past week I heard people talking about skipping class to prepare for exams, favoring a good grade over the learning experience.

We have only 12 precious weeks of learning during each of our eight semesters at the University. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to calculate how much money each class hour is worth, but I have. While the exact price may vary depending on the course load, it is an indisputably large sum. I feel pretty uneasy about giving up such class time just to survive another test. When exams start interfering with the actual learning process, isn’t it time to examine the examination process?

The issue here seems to be the definition of examinations. “Exam,” the way the word is used now, evokes fear in hundreds of students, who immediately link their numerical grade with their future job prospects. But shouldn’t an examination be viewed more as an opportunity for a student to inspect oneself and the material at hand? An examination should be an exciting learning opportunity. The exam should serve learning, instead of learning serving the exam.

In my freshman seminar on philosophical argument mapping, we hand in weekly problem sets. When my professor referred to this week’s problem set as our “midterm,” she said it would not be weighted more heavily in our final grade. This problem set, like all others, is meant to serve as just another stepping-stone in our learning process. Why would this stepping-stone be more important than the ones we experienced the weeks before?

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If midterm exams aren’t learning opportunities, then why do they exist? To tell us how much we know? I believe that all students have survived enough assessments of all sorts, just to get here, that we already know how to assess ourselves without the help of a number or a letter.

In an ideal world, exams would be incorporated more seamlessly into the learning process. There wouldn’t need to be an entire week devoted to studying for, and surviving, examinations. Not because we would eliminate assessments, but rather the exams would be integrated into the structure of each class when appropriate, instead of being held at an arbitrary point during the sixth week of the semester. Perhaps, then, people wouldn’t spend this week greeting one another with beaten down or sympathetic expressions. Perhaps, then, we would not need to offer tea and cookies as a way to console those who have been avoiding human contact in the hopes that self-sacrifice will appease the grading gods.

If exams are part of the learning process, and we like learning (why else would we be at Princeton?), then the end result of this kind of change would undoubtedly be reduced stress and higher grades. We shouldn’t strive to survive our tests, just as we don’t strive to merely survive our time at Princeton. Just as we are encouraged to view every day at Princeton as an educational experience that should bring us joy, we ought to view our exams as an opportunity to learn, grow and be happy.

Iris Samuels is a freshman from Zichron Yakov, Israel. She can be reached at isamuels@princeton.edu.

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