The stress that comes from the daunting fear of upcoming midterms or finals week is something that every student at Schreiber is all-too-well accustomed to.

Despite the fact that there is a more lenient schedule during these specific testing days, it is evident that no student can claim to particularly enjoy the intense cramming and studying they go through in order to recall all of the material they learned throughout the semester in preparation for these exams.

Thus, an array of nearby public schools, such as Jericho and Great Neck South, have successfully replaced the long-standing midterm and final system with new “quarterly” exams. These exams are administered at the end of each quarter instead of a midterm.

As these tests are administered once after every marking period, students need to study a significantly decreased amount of material as the assessment only covers that specific quarter’s worth of work.

Compared to the current highly weighted midterms and finals, quarterlies will also weigh much less towards students’ final quarter grades as well.

In addition to this noteworthy benefit of a reduction of stress to the students, eliminating the special schedule for midterms and finals also adds two additional weeks of instructional teaching days and class time for the administration during the year.

Teachers would therefore be able to use this time to go ahead of the year’s material or more thoroughly cover a difficult unit.

Furthermore, quarterlies would theoretically provide a more accurate reflection of a student’s development throughout the marking period. This is because quarterlies focus on more specific topics than midterms which can show teachers and students exactly what topics are troubling them.

The Schreiber Times strongly believes that our school should take into heart the tremendous advantages of quarterlies over the overload of stress that students are forced to bear with our current examination system.