With midterm week just passed, many varying opinions arise every year, sparking controversy on how they should be administered. Currently, Southeast leaves most midterms up to the teachers and allows them to decide how they would like to administer them. Some of them are about the last topic we learn or a project, but most are over an entire semester of learning. While it does make sense to cover an entire semester, some people see midterms as useless if you put all your work into a class and one test makes it all come crashing down. Many students don’t do well on tests because of varying factors that can limit performance, and one test can make all the difference.
According to a study conducted by the National Library of Medicine, it shows that 25%-40% of all students experience test anxiety and feel as though it limits their performance. (“How to Overcome Test Anxiety: 8 Helpful Tips | CWI”) This is an extremely high percentage of students, especially when you consider the number of tests they take each week. If a class is based on testing, then a test for the midterm makes sense, but if you have set up a class that is more of a day-to-day work situation, it is unfair to the students to choose to do a test that is out of the norm to show the full extent of what you have been doing in class.
Another factor of lessened performance on tests is lack of sleep and time to regulate nerves and thoughts. Almost every student is involved in some sort of activity, and when you place an entire week of testing on them, they are bound to be affected. According to another study conducted by the National Library of Medicine, 69% of students were recorded to get less than seven hours of sleep a night (“Sleep Insufficiency, Sleep Health Problems and Performance in High School Students”), and this only decreases when midterms come around. Limited sleep is extremely harmful to just one test, so it is illogical for schools to expect students to show their best work on each test in each class if their brains are already tired and not at peak performance.
To combat these problems, other schools in our area have chosen different methods to assess students’ knowledge at the end of a semester. Sacred Heart gets out of school two days early, and those days are completely dedicated to midterms. If the students in that class have an A or less than a certain number of absences, they are exempt from the final and do not have to show up to the class that day. Central and South also have a similar policy where they are given a “card” that exempts them if they meet the standard GPA to be exempt. Why Southeast hasn’t adopted this policy is confusing to many, as many students’ grades would have been safe from their midterm if they had ended their semester before the last test.
In conclusion, many students all over the nation feel as though midterms are useless when you spend at least a semester trying to keep a certain grade, and one test wrecks it all. If midterms were used to show what you know, yet you’ve already proved that, then why do students have to prove it again, especially if they aren’t the greatest test takers? I am on the side that teachers should care about you actually knowing what they are trying to teach and making sure we understand, instead of just being able to spit back useless information on the test, if we don’t understand it. Every system has ways it can be improved, and I believe that the way we do midterms and finals isn’t exempt from that.
Works Cited
“How to Overcome Test Anxiety: 8 Helpful Tips | CWI.” College of Western Idaho, 14 March 2023, https://cwi.edu/news/blog/how-overcome-test-anxiety-8-helpful-tips. Accessed 16 December 2025.
“Sleep Insufficiency, Sleep Health Problems and Performance in High School Students.” Sleep Insufficiency, Sleep Health Problems and Performance in High School Students, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3212860/. Accessed 16 December 2025.
