Busiest time of school year

You wake up after a four-hour sleep to get to school. It’s presentation day and you’ve stayed up until 1 a.m. every night this week to finish it. Your head aches, you’re exhausted and you’re a little nervous but you deliver the presentation and sit down. Ah. One down, three to go.

Now you just have to prepare your next presentation, and then the next one, and then the one after that. And just when you think about lying down for a nap or going out for dinner with a friend or two, you remember that you have to study for your first exam. Then study for your second exam, then the exam after that and then the one after that. If you fail the math exam, you fail the class. If you get a low mark on your English exam, universities won’t want you. Mom wants you on honour roll this year and the teachers just don’t understand why you look so tired all the time.

Exam season is the worst time of year for high school students. Instead of preparing for the next semester or celebrating the near-completion of this one, high school students are cramming everything they have learned in one semester onto study sheets, staying up all night to finish projects and panicking internally. Ontario high school students must discover a way to cope with colossal amounts of stress and create a studying schedule for the biggest tests of the year, on top of handing all of their final projects in on time.

Exams are worth a full 15 per cent of a student’s grade and the other 15 per cent comes from their final task. That is 30 per cent of a student’s grade, hanging in the air in the last two weeks of their semester. They are vital for students to complete and sometimes, the mark will determine whether the student will pass or fail the class. If a student falls sick or misses a bit of school, it is not very likely that they will receive an extension since teachers have a very limited time to mark all of the tasks before the semester ends.

On top of studying for four exams and creating four final projects, most students must balance work or athletics too. Therefore, if one student plays basketball twice a week for two hours each night, and also works a part-time job, how do they have the same shot at an exam that an unemployed and not-so-busy student has?

It’s often a choice. Students either write a mediocre exam and have an excellent presentation, or they write a really awesome exam but have just a mediocre presentation. The ones that can do both have made the choice to sacrifice their sleep, their social life, their shifts at work, their mental health. It is very difficult for one to maintain a typical day-to-day routine if their entire day (and night) is dedicated to passing their classes.

Perhaps, instead of cramming everything important into the last two weeks of school, it could be considered that other assignments assigned during the year be weighted a bit heavier so that when the last few weeks of a semester rolls around, students just have to write a final test and be done with their classes. Having to remember and re-memorize everything from one class, plus creating a large project to summarize it at as well already creates a ridiculous amount of grief, but doing it for three more classes seems nearly impossible.