Hell week begins. A mental countdown is set, and procrastination needs to be fought.
Most engineering students are familiar with hell week as we DO have it almost every term. You may have just gone through one last week. I guess it’s convenient for the school to schedule it that way, with up to five midterms in a row, all in one week. Whether it is to avoid time conflict or to minimize the length of the painful journey, many of us would agree that this ‘hell’ is still quite challenging to survive. So why don’t we relax this schedule and achieve our goal easier and also better?
It is difficult to prepare for five consecutive midterms by the Sunday of the night before. There are always those who are extremely gifted in managing their time (though I’m still not sure if it is a trait or skill) who would have handled this like carrying an umbrella after hearing a forecast for rain. Not possessing that talent may be very discouraging. But it is not always time management to blame.
Normal days for an engineering student involve class until late afternoon, assignments, labs, and constantly checking Jobmine. A ‘normal’ week of school is already scheduled very tightly, with new materials covered for half of the day, in parallel to many due dates for reports and assignments. In addition to such inflexibility, interviews may be announced on Jobmine at any moment. The Jobmine process is not generous in accommodating for upcoming midterms. Now, you have to immediately put everything down and get ready for this interview. This disrupts one’s study plan and causes one to sacrifice the course work for interviews. If you happen to miss important lectures for a midterm, then it expounds the problem. We realize that certain things must be sacrificed because we have a very short time frame. Each day leading up to hell week, you have very few hours to review for the upcoming exams, assuming that you go to lectures, sleep, eat, and attend interviews.
Furthermore, even if you were successful in getting yourself ready for hell week, there are still lots of other possible risks.
There is an unrealistic assumption that students will not become emotionally affected by their academic performance in previous exams. Morale goes down with poor performance, affecting one’s ability to study efficiently. When there are exams every day, it is challenging to put the thoughts about your previous performance aside and focus on the remaining exams.
Also, if you’re unfortunate enough to have illnesses lasting over a week, it would seriously damage your entire academic record for all courses that term. The consequence of deferring five midterms is not pleasing either, because it is likely that your final weighting will be inclusive of all the missed midterms.
You need luck and preparation to make it through hell week smoothly. It drains you physically and emotionally, making it harder towards the end.
The aftermath of hell week still carries the chaotic momentum as well. In lectures, as soon as the class covers the material up to midterm, it is likely for students to stop paying attention and focus on material that will be tested. Afterwards, there is a high possibility of finding yourself very behind in classes. From an overall perspective, hell week introduces a big interruption to the regular academic flow and prolongs the damage that is not perfectly recoverable.
If exams were more spread apart, maybe one or two exams per week, it would be more manageable to stay caught up in lectures. Doing well in exams requires time management skill, concentration, detailed planning, mind-control and willpower. But we learned that for hell week, there are uncontrollable factors such as interviews, illness and who knows what else.
Unfortunately, our normal school days are extremely heavy and inflexible. As a result, scheduling many exams back-to-back in the span of a week risks the exam preparation itself, staying caught-up in lectures, performance through the exam week and students’ emotional and physical well-being.
Keeping a good academic record that shows your hard work is an important goal for undergrads. To give them a fair chance, students need to be tested on their knowledge after given enough time to prepare and rest before each exam.
Hell week schedule violates all these aspects in providing the adequate circumstances for assessment of knowledge and could eventually lead to flawed academic record that is permanent and to be reviewed in the future with no mention of the odds.
Leave a Reply