Midterms and Finals

I find midterm exams much more difficult to handle than the Finals. For one thing other classes don't stop for the midterm and include what was taught in the last class, maybe the class before. That is brutal. If you have to go back and do things you could have done weeks earlier, then you won't have nearly enough time. Even with as much as possible already done, you still fall behind in your other classes. Or when you have two midterms on the same day, you obviously will study for both, but closer to the date you have to make a decision. If you try to study both equally, you either just won’t do it, or you won't retain anything for either one. So you learn that you have to focus on one that you will study more for. The first midterms I did were the hardest, because I hadn't learned to figure out what the prof really wanted on the exam. I can do that better now, but it still is the hardest thing in most of my courses.

Finals were much less frightening than I'd expected in September. At least for finals, you can focus on them because your classes are over. The finals are based on what you have learned throughout the term, you have already studied half the stuff for midterms, and only half is new.

The worst problem with finals were the bonehead profs who were so slow throughout the term and then went zipped through the material like lightning during the last few classes. One told us, as he raced through the classes, what we had to know for the final and what we didn’t have to know, which was great. But another just said, “know everything” and that wasn’t so great. Gee, thanks for narrowing it down! In another class, the exam was full of stuff that the prof had barely even talked about in class. If I hadn’t been taking two other courses where that material was covered, I wouldn’t even have know what the questions were about. You never know what you are going to learn in one class that will help you in another.