School is a place that we learn and grow as individuals. Homework, quizzes, tests, and classwork is daily when attending school. Testing students’ knowledge and seeing where they rank is crucial to the school system. Midterms and final exams are testing that students take every year. 

Students are given the choice in their seven classes to exempt with a passing grade of an A or B for both quarters. If you exempt the midterm in a core class in the first semester, you won’t be able to exempt the final exam in the second semester. If you have an elective that is half a year you could still exempt the midterm. Even though, there isn’t any final exam for a half year elective, you could still exempt the midterm with the right grades for it.  

With the pandemic this year and its spiking and dropping of numbers, midterms have been moved to be after break. With the midterms being moved after break students have mixed emotions. Having the midterms after break could be a good thing to some people because it gives extra time for studying and catching up on missed work they need to turn in. “I would say that I much prefer them to be after break therefore giving the students a prolonged time to study for all of their exams without the stress of homework every night,”  Alexis Gannon (’24) said.  

 On the other hand, having midterms after break could be a bad thing because over break the knowledge you just learned could slip from your head. “I feel that no one’s going to study over break and that we are all going to most likely fail all of our midterms,” Calum Greening (’24) said. Also, for the week we come back from break is the week we will start doing the midterms tests for some classes. This could give students less time to prepare if they didn’t prepare over break. “Personally, I don’t like it. Simply because I don’t actually get to enjoy my break rather, I have to stress about midterms when we get back and hope that most of my knowledge is retained. This is a much-needed break and I think we can all agree on that with all the protocols and everything that goes with COVID-19, in which I rather not be forced to study and work during this break,” Leyanie Larry (‘24) said. Having to prepare over break is mostly an unrealistic thing for students to do because of the other opportunities available during the school free two weeks.