OPINIONS| 9
Staples midterms unnecessarily stress out students !"##$%&'"()%*+,
Assistant Creative Director
A
s a freshman, the idea of midterm tests gripped me with dizzying anxiety. I could feel the clock ticking away for 120 minutes as students anxiously shivered, all with 10% of my final grade hanging precariously in the balance. Sure, I was only a freshman, and everything turned out fine in the end. However, I can’t minimize the palpable relief I felt when finals were canceled for the 2020-21 school year because of
midterms do not fulfill the criteria set out by WPS. Actually, they make it all the more difficult for students to perform well in school at all. How can we reach our full potential if instead of learning Staples students are stagnating, revisiting the same content we already proved we learned over the past two quarters? T h e Harvard Graduate School of Education measured that the higher the stakes a test has, the more cortisol, a stress hormone, students produce. According to the study, the more cortisol produced, the worse students do on a test, even if they previously performed well in the past on lower
Midterms do not fulfill the criteria set out by WPS. Actually, they make it all the more difficult for students to perform well in school at all.
COVID-19. This relief allowed me to concentrate more on my classes, especially in the second and fourth quarters because I could actually spend more time learning. In a typical year, attempts to introduce new material in the weeks after December break is essentially essentially mootw—when moo—when midterms are fast approaching, school becomes a blur of stressing, reviewing and studying. Westport Public Schools states that the purpose of assessments is to measure progress “to ensure that each child reaches his or her potential.” But
Photo dramatization by Charley Guthartz ’22
Graphic by Rachel Greenberg ’22 & Maya Hruskar ’23
-stakes assessments. One could argue that these high stakes tests merely reward the students who don’t stress and produce a lot of cortisol. We got rid of midterms last year, and did the world stop spinning? No. Did Staples students miserably fail their classes? No.
The school has set the precedent that midterms can be canceled. It’s up to Staples: does the administration want us to reach our “potential” or not?
Scan this QR code to view the midterm schedule.
