I have a midterm at 7PM.
I don’t know about you, but I really hate evening midterms. I know it’s all about having it standardized and all, but there are so many little things that make it not worth it.
1. It sucks when your classes end at 12 and you have to stay at school for 7 hours just to write a midterm. It sucks even more when you don’t have class that day and the midterm is on a Friday night. I had that happen to me once. It wasted my long weekend. It was a very sunny Friday too.
2. Staying late means I have to pack a dinner in addition to a lunch. I personally like to pack my own food because I don’t really like the food served on campus, and thus having to bring that extra meal in addition to my textbooks and possibly my laptop makes my backpack look like it’s going to explode. Lugging it around the whole day is another matter.
3. Commuting is a bother. I live about an hour commute from UBC, so when I have a midterm that ends at night, busing really sucks since there are very limited buses. It sucks even more because everyone ends around the same time and make it to the bus loop around the same time. The result? Overcrowded buses.
4. Building up on that, people are prone to talk about the exam you just wrote. I don’t know about you, but when my midterm is over, I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to know what I got wrong. Just let me get home first.
Just my little rant about why I prefer in-class exams more.
I totally agree with you. Sometimes I’d just rather have the exam early in the morning so I get it overwith; having a test later in the day makes me feel obligated to spend the hours before it studying for it. Last semester, all of my midterms were on Tuesdays at noon, but this semester I’ve had many of them at night, although not as late as you – at 6pm.
I guess I can’t relate to your frustration about commuting though, as I live about 15 minutes away from campus, so it’s not too bad.
So you’ve noticed that more people talk about the exam afterwards if its a night exam? I thought people always did that regardless…:)
Gerry
27 Mar 11 at 7:28 am
Well people talk about it all the time, it’s just that when it’s a standardized exam and everyone walking towards the bus loop has just taken the same exam, it just gets magnified :P
Renee
27 Mar 11 at 11:59 am