Goodbye Midterms, Hello Good Grades

The education system in the United States has many flaws that should be revised. One of the major problems in the system is making students take midterms. Midterms should be optional to students because it usually only hurts students grades. On the website http://rogerhub.com/final-grade-calculator/ it shows the grade a student needs on the final to reach the certain overall grade they want. If a student has a 97 in a class and gets a 100% on the midterm it wont bring the overall grade up at all. But if a student gets a 72 on the midterm exam it drops their overall grade to a 92. That drops their grade from an A to an A-, and that might not seem like a big deal but it affects the overall GPA. On the other hand if a student has a 70 in the class and gets a 100, it will bring up their overall grade to a 76. If midterms were optional the student that needs to bring their grade up could take the midterm and the student that doesn’t need it because they already have a good grade doesn’t need to take it.  Also a student who has a 97 in the class clearly does well on the tests when it is taken so at one point they learned the material in detail. Having a student recall everything they’ve learned the past 5 months in 7 different subjects is close to impossible. Cramming for these exams can cause a lot of stress on the students and tends to make our break their grades. On midterm week students cram so much studying in that they often don’t get much sleep thus causing sleep exhaustion by the end of the week and their performance on the midterms decreases. Students are often unprepared for their midterms because the teachers don’t give any time to do review in class. The teachers expect the students to do review on their own which is very difficult to do for 7 classes. On top of reviewing on their own time, teachers assign projects, tests, and quizzes because it’s the last week of the quarter therefore that’s all the students are focusing and studying for. They are too worried about doing well on the assignment due the last week of the quarter that they don’t have time to study for the midterms that week. Overall midterms should be optional to the students because most of the time they do more harm than good.