GUEST COLUMNIST: Are too many midterms damaging our students?

It's June, and if you ask me, nothing could be finer (or luckier) than being able to spend a sunny weekday morning sitting in a summer school class. And so, exercising nothing more than my staff privilege, I am taking Italian 110, or rather it takes me -- to places I've never been, with sounds and rhythms I've never really known. All I have to do is humble myself before students whose younger minds and ears are quicker, more receptive than my own. Small cost, I think, when every day I get to soak up words like the sun. Do you know that grattugiato means "grated"? Roll that across your tongue next time someone asks you to please, pass the cheese. What poetry! What fun! How could I have forgotten? I have spent the last year as the house dean of Harrison College House, watching over the daily lives of some 830 students. If done correctly, this is a very big job, but one of the rewards is the chance to talk with as many undergraduates as one could ever want or manage. Everyday I chat with them -- in the lobby, in my office, in the hallways, especially in the elevators. For the most part, Penn undergrads are a friendly and outgoing sort. At least for a while. But after only a few weeks of the semester have passed, a good number of these same cheerful students turn restive and distracted. To get on an elevator in the morning is too often to step into a silence as deep and icy as a winter's ocean. Such reticence, it is believed, is the only thing one might well expect in a structure as big and impersonal as a high rise. But I know better. It ain't the building that makes everyone so glum. The cause lies beyond its homely walls. And when I tease my young friends about not talking, they always raise their furtive eyes and grumble, "Midterms." And this whether it is three weeks into the semester or three weeks from its end. Am I missing something? Doesn't "a midterm" mean an examination given at the midpoint of the semester, or more or less then? But now, any test, no matter when it's given, can become "a midterm" and students have to get over or through a long line of them, sometimes even two or three in a single course. The tests are set like endless hurdles against the always receding horizon of the semester, from near the beginning to near the end. This, I'm afraid, is nonsense. What I'm asking you to consider instead is the emotional and psychological effect of these multiple midterms on the students themselves. How debilitating it must be to study as hard as you can for the midterm in a course only to have another "midterm" looming three or four weeks later. And if someone should complain that there is nothing more at stake here than the definition of a word or a bit of grouchiness on an elevator, I'd remind them that only last semester there was much justifiable worry over a "drinking problem" here at Penn. I don't know much about drinking problems but as a house dean I've had to deal with my share of residents who show up back at Harrison dead drunk. What worries me most about their drinking is that it is so terribly unhappy, even desperate. Some Penn students undergraduates, I'm convinced, have a taste for oblivion. This frightening situation is, as the theorists say, "overdetermined," but surely one of the many reasons for it is the student's desire to escape an academic environment in which the pressure is constantly ratcheted up, in which everything happens too often and too quickly. I don't think much would be lost if we slowed things down a bit around here. And perhaps something would be gained. Might as well call it enjoyment. What we need then, keeping in mind my figure of the icy ocean above, is a little shrinkage. So here's my truly modest proposal: How about limiting "midterms" to a two-week period, say, from the beginning of the seventh week of the semester to the end of the eighth? And, pleasekids, let's play nice: No more than one midterm per course. My simple plan, I realize, won't cure all our woes, but it might help to make everyday life at Penn a little more pleasant. Maybe more like summer school. Which reminds me: I must go outside and study. Che bel tempo! Grazie. Ciao!

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.