It's the end of my first round of midterms for spring semester and I'm learning a lot about college life. I'm an excessive coffee drinker, I need a nap to survive the week, I'm a sucker for the Girl Scouts selling cookies in front of the Undergraduate Library and Rams Gym (they take credit cards and Venmo, ugh now I need a box of Thin Mints) and I still don't know how to properly study for an exam.
During fall semester, I had my first round of midterms ever. I never took a real exam in high school as my school system banned exams midway through my sophomore year. Teachers were no longer allowed to give cumulative exams at the end of the first and second semester, but could hold "end of quarter" tests that took no longer than 1.5 hours. Our exam schedule of a two hour exam, a 30 minute break and a second two hour exam was ditched in favor of our usual class schedule, removing those reduced days to join the semesters fluidly.
I narrowly missed exams through having "midterms," or exams at the end of the first semester, since they were snowed out both my freshman and sophomore years. At the end of my freshman year, we did have "finals" but they were non-cumulative tests that weighed as much as any other test or projects that we did in class. Nothing major.
At the time, it felt like a blessing, not having to worry about taking a cumulative exam in Algebra II with Trigonometry and Chemistry. I had no clue what it would mean for me in the future and how it would affect my college success.
That meant that going into Carolina, the only major exams that I had taken were two SAT's (one of each of the old format and the new format), an ACT and the eight AP exams that I had taken throughout high school. I studied by taking practice tests from Princeton Review books and then walked in on test day with a calculator, bag of pens, pencils, and erasers, a bottle of water and a Ziploc bag of Cheez-It's to take the exam. At the end of each of those tests, I would take myself out to go eat and then relax for a while.
As a First Year at Carolina, I quickly learned that midterms and finals are real and it scared me. I remember asking my roommate about exams and she just went, "how have you never had a midterm or a final?" before telling me that she had an exam in every class she had taken throughout high school. I felt extremely unprepared and wondered for what felt like the thousandth time how had I gotten into Carolina?
I stressed out about an exam on Development and Inequality only to find that it was just a lot of writing and explaining key theories we had learned in class. My midterm for Intro to Journalism was 50 multiple choice questions on guest speakers. Since this was the first time I had ever taken an exam, I did what anyone else in my position would do, I printed out every page of notes that I had taken up to that point and studied them, highlighting, annotating, building example questions and creating study guides. I was lucky that this would help me pass (and actually do perfectly fine) on these tests.
When finals rolled around, I repeated the process that had worked during midterms. I did alright.
Here I am, done with my first round of exams and I can say that those study tools that had worked fall semester didn't work well this spring. Human Anatomy is killing my GPA and taking up a lot of my spare time. I have study guides, forty pages of notes of four different systems of the body and 38 muscles, a Quizlet and thirteen PowerPoints (with voiceover from a professor) just for this single class and sadly, I need to find a better way to study for the next exam (in three weeks).
Do it for the kids and reinstate exams at the end of each semester to help your high schoolers prepare for college. I am sure I am not the first alum of my school system having trouble with college exams because we had never taken them in high school. This lack of preparation puts us at a gaping difference behind our classmates, as they at least know the drill and they've figured out what works best for them.
Do it for the kids and give them the skills that they need to succeed.
