As exam season steadily approaches, mixed emotions are rising in students about what this means for them. Along with those emotions, there is a bit of confusion regarding exams and whether they are truly helping students.
As a student myself, I can say that with exams comes stress. Having to re-memorize five months and six classes worth of knowledge feels almost impossible. Exams can make or break grades despite what the grades were before taking the exam.
For many students, exams bring them anxiety and stress that will inevitably lead to a lack of sleep, mood changes, little appetite, excessive self-criticism, and sometimes even physical effects such as headaches. Exams take a huge toll on both students’ mental and physical health. Burnout, one of the most common symptoms of exams, is the feeling of mental and physical exhaustion. Burnout causes students to lose both motivation in school and faith in themselves. This weakens students’ ability to succeed and prevents them from performing at their best for exams and even school work leading up to exams.
Oftentimes, parents, guardians, and even teachers aren’t fully aware of what exam preparation and the exams themselves are like for their students. We students generally aren’t able to sustain months of information from six classes in our brains for long periods of time. Many people do not understand the amount of pressure that is weighted on exams. There are numerous expectations when it comes to high school in general, keeping up with grades being one of them. If, for example, you are doing fairly well in a class and just so happen to slip up on the exam, that could tank your grade completely. However, if someone did not put any effort whatsoever into a class, and by luck they happen to do well on the exam, that could boost their grade immensely.
There is a major question in this situation: Is this fair to judge a whole semester’s worth of hard work or, a lack thereof, on a single large test? A test that conjures up stress and anxiety that could affect the way they execute the exam?
The thing about exams is that they perfectly demonstrate how much or how little students learned over the course of the semester. They display the amount of growth and effort that took place and even the amount of information that was comprehended by the students. They’re a great way to determine the progress a student has made and the academic level they are at. Still, exams and standardized tests mock our mental health and deem it insignificant.
A possible solution to this could be earlier exam preparations. Granting students extra time to get that study guide or to set aside whole class participation review days could potentially fix the issue. Even weighing the exams less could allow at least a fraction of the pressure to be released. Exams do not need to be removed from the curriculum; they simply need to be stress-free.
