High school is busy. Students prepare for their future all while maintaining the precarious balance between social life, academics, and extracurriculars. And with so much stress on students 24/7, having even one test can be stressful. But having multiple tests on the same day? Not just two or three, but four to five all at once? That can definitely affect someone. Unfortunately, it is a very real occurrence that CHS students deal with every day.
While there may be some flexibility with teachers when it comes to test days, they still often end up with a student having a major load of stress on their shoulders. Unsurprisingly, that stress leads to poor performance on the subject causing it, no matter how much a student may have studied beforehand. Multiple tests also means students cram study last minute, their already overwhelmed mind shutting down and procrastinating due to having too many things on their plate. Sleep schedules suffer, mental health goes down the drain, and grades plummet.
Sleep plays an important role in memory retention, as a lot of information is processed by the brain while the body is asleep. Less sleep means that the content learned in schools is more likely to remain in the short term memory and then dumped; what should take place is the understanding of the content, which is then stored in long term memory. Students who have multiple tests will often find themselves staying up later, trying to review and absorb all the information they can, even if they are already prepared. And as a result of sleeping late, the information they tried to remember will slip away the following day.
Senior Yaroslava Willard reflected on her past experiences of having exams on the same day in junior year, considering it the most difficult time in high school.
“Personally, it got me really tired,” Willard says. “I went to sleep super late and the next day I did not feel good at all. I was so tired taking those tests and I feel like I would have done better if I had gotten a little bit more sleep the day before.”
It is very easy to get technical with these results, but what about the emotional aspects of these test schedules? Society has seen a push to a focus on mental health in recent years, even more so after the COVID pandemic. After all, stress is always a contributing factor to a decline in mental health, no matter how big or small it might seem. Tests induce anxiety and can cause students to spiral mentally in the days leading up to a test. What is worse, those bad grades usually lead students to even more issues—a common one being a loss of self-esteem caused by students feeling lesser than their peers due to their lower scores. Over time, this loss of self-esteem may lead to anxiety and depression, which has the potential to affect a student’s academic life even further.
Now, if teachers were to coordinate and stagger their testing dates, students would not only be less stressed, but likely perform better on their exams. Instead of cramming for five exams at once, they would have more time to focus on each subject and improve their scores, as well retain more information from that unit. Cumulative assessment grades would undeniably improve and push class averages up schoolwide. Those good scores will bring a sense of accomplishment and pride that can improve the student’s mood for the rest of the day.
While it may be difficult for all teachers to coordinate around each other with the hundreds of different schedules students have, it is plausible to have some sort of general guidelines for when tests are taken for each subject. Students’ performances and mental health would improve significantly, setting them up for a more successful future.
