Poly will have a week in January solely devoted to midterms this year. This midterm week will replace last year’s in-class midterms, which was a change from the previous system: a midterm week before winter break in December.
In the past, Poly held its midterm week before winter break, but changed the policy last year. According to Head of the Upper School Sarah Bates, many of the faculty and administrators expressed concerns about the uneven number of weeks between the fall and spring semesters, which was a problem specifically concerning electives that only span one semester. Having midterms before winter break meant that fall semester electives were a few weeks shorter than spring semester electives, which led to challenges for teachers trying to cover the same material each semester.
Bates said, “[December midterm week] ended up taking an already shortened fall semester and shortening it even more because you lost a week of teaching time due to that midterm week.” She also added that teachers were especially concerned about a reserved midterm week post-COVID, when they were dealing with the learning loss that resulted from online learning.
Although the administration was hopeful after replacing midterm week with in-class midterms, Bates said, “It ended up not really doing us any favors.” Instead, “Teachers were still feeling like either students weren’t fully attentive because they were going into an exam or just coming out of one, or they were already giving up some of their own teaching time so that kids had time to study for a test,” added Bates.
English teacher Gerald Stone agreed with Bates that having midterms in class led to distractions, and prefers an official midterm week. “If [students] were in class they’d be thinking about their next day’s finals. That’s not really a healthy situation. So it’s better to just take a break and make sure kids are here for their [midterm],” said Stone.
Stone believes midterms are a crucial part of learning because they provide “a real opportunity to do some reviewing and to take stock of where we are at the mid year.” The Brandeis International School supports his view, as it found that midterms “are often the first indicator of how well a student is absorbing, processing, and retaining the class material.”
Stone explained that teachers do lose teaching time when there is a midterm week, but he thinks this comes with something valuable. He believes that students “gain a real good, strong experience, which we think is more valuable than the teaching time lost.”
Poly midterm week prepared University of Pennsylvania sophomore Holden Lipton ‘22 for challenging midterms in college. “The process of accumulating your notes and studying the material in a timely and efficient manner was important,” Lipton said, continuing by adding that “Poly does a really good job in general” of preparing students for intensive testing in college.
Math teacher Geeta Vir also said that longer midterms have benefits that extend beyond just learning material for the class. Most Poly students end up taking the SAT or ACT, which are multi-hour exams. Vir said longer midterms are helpful because “it’s important that we prepare [students] solely for the actual sitting time” required for standardized testing.
Vir believes that students will gain the necessary knowledge from either midterms in class or in a formal midterm week. She prefers midterm week for practical reasons. “Having it in class, there’s so many different factors you have to take into consideration. What if there are sports events and some students will be absent for one day but not the second part of the exam?”
In a January 2023 Polygon article, senior and Polygon News Editor Anjali Budhram reported that one of Poly’s goals in eliminating the dedicated midterm week was to reduce student stress. However, for junior Cici Malley, midterm week was less stressful than having in-class midterms. “I was definitely less stressed when we didn’t have classes in between the tests and everything, because the classes gave me additional work that I didn’t need in order to do my midterms,” said Malley.
Senior Julia Rosenberg agreed that in-class midterms were more stressful than midterm week. Rosenberg said, “I think that I would have done better last year if I actually had a full week to study and prepare.”
However, Stone believes midterm week might be more stressful, stating that midterm week means longer exams and entire grades of students taking the test together in the gym, which raises the intensity level. Still, he thinks the increased stress is worth it because midterm week “is getting Poly back to being a bit more rigorous, like before the pandemic.”
