Blog: Take the exams and go home

Well it comes down to these last weeks. All of your hard work and commitment culminates in exam week. Either that or you realize half the assignments you completed over the semester were pretty much meaningless when compared to a final worth 30 % of your grade. Either way, the last week of second semester has a habit of making the summer seem so far away. Snow in April doesn’t help much either.

Exams are never fun, but there’s no reason to go insane over them.

Rule one: spend more time studying and less time stressing. Everybody knows that guy who breaks rule one. He runs around frantically, talking continuously about how he has so much more work to do than you. He typically has something like seven honors exams, plus an obscene amount of papers plus other stuff that you don’t care about but he won’t shut up about. And you think, “If he studied as much as he complained, he would ace his exams.” Well there you go. Don’t be that guy.

Rule two: think exams, not summer. Nothing sounds sweeter to you than a warm summer day far away from anything school-related. You’re not alone. But school doesn’t end until you fill in the last bubble of the Scan-tron. Think of how much more rewarded you will feel if you step out of your last class feeling confident. Could summer start off any better? But if you decide to kick it off a week early, you’ll spend at least a week worrying whether or not you failed. And if you did fail, your parents are probably not going to let you forget it all summer long. Don’t let a week of “summeritis” ruin what you’ve been looking forward to since school started.

Rule three: do it yourself. Adderall makes zombies, not good students. For some reason a lot of college students feel the need to pop a pill when they have work to do. Maybe it’s because they’re concerned about doing well? Maybe pressure plays into it? Or maybe people take it because they’re just lazy and not responsible enough to do work themselves. So these particular students acquire something that most students don’t have to concentrate and perform better on tests. Sounds a lot like cheating, doesn’t it? Don’t be a cheater. Study hard on your own. Take your exam on your own. And get your grade back knowing you did it all on your own. Will power works a lot harder than little white pills.

Finally, here’s one for you “give-a-damn-at-the-last-minute” students. You decided early on that college is for drinking, not studying. You wasted the whole year partying. You’re probably going to be spending quite a while longer paying for the party. Good work, good investment. But even the dreaded exam week gets to you too. Guilt and motivation kick in at the last minute, and you’re finally ready to kick it into gear. Well, don’t bother, you’re screwed. You spent the whole year not caring, why start now? Rule four: if you blew off the whole school year, you might as well do the same for exams.

Rule four: take the exams and go home. Forget everything you learned over the school year on that first summer night.