With midterms quickly approaching, a feeling of angst and anxiety is running rampant throughout Scituate High School. While a handful of high school students feel confident when it comes to test taking, many feel overwhelmed when it comes to midterm week, especially those who have never experienced the tests before. Midterms and finals almost always provoke stress and hours of studying from students at Scituate High School, but they often provoke a question as well: Are midterms and finals truly necessary for students to understand and comprehend their course material, or are they simply another formality?

Despite their obvious application to college finals, many students at SHS view midterms as rather useless, and as a test that forces students to cram information into their heads rather than actually learning and comprehending the material. “The midterm is a creation of man, it is an evil we put into this world,” junior and self-proclaimed transcendentalist Matthew Kalpin said. “When you go on a walk through nature, you don’t see bears, or antelopes, or wallabies taking midterms. Midterms do not prepare us for the real world, knowledge only comes through experience.”

While a strong counter argument exists against these statements, Kalpin does make a good point. It seems silly that one test should hold such a bearing over a student’s final grade, especially after the hours of hard work that have been put into the class throughout the year. The nature of tests such as midterms, one might argue, forces students to care more about their grades rather than the actual material, distracting from the goal of the education system all together. Researchers at Point Loma Nazarene University have mentioned that the pressure resulting from large tests,  and the expectations of our current education system in general, can often even lead to academic dishonesty. According to this research, many students feel the education system values a number on a piece of paper rather than skills and knowledge that will be applicable to the real world.

Midterms are stressful for most students, but they are especially stressful for freshmen, who have yet to experience the tests for themselves. “Having not taken them before,” freshmen Mark Falvey said, “I don’t really know what to expect. I have heard some of the tests are pretty hard, so I’m a bit nervous taking the tests for the first time.”

    Despite students animosity towards these tests, midterms are coming, and there’s nothing student’s can really do but calm down and be prepared. While midterms will come and go within a week, the question as to whether these tests are truly necessary will remain on many student’s minds. Midterms and finals aren’t going anywhere any time soon, so while we are free to ponder over the necessity of such tests, there is no sense in protesting them altogether.