By Maile Winterbottom (V)
As a Pingry student, I experience a lot of stress. From essays to tests to presentations to quizzes, the work never seems to stop piling on. However, there is a common theme in the stress that my peers and I experience: poor timing.
Over the past few years, I’ve started to notice that assessments come in big stressful waves, usually lasting a week or so. One week might be pretty uneventful, with a lull in big assessments and stress levels on the decline. Then, before you know it, you have six tests in one week, not to mention a paper due for English class. Looking at my planner, plenty of weeks are completely covered in the red ink that signifies a large test or essay, while others are almost empty of it. This led me to ask myself: why can’t all of this work be divided up evenly between the weeks?
Students at Pingry are constantly caught between two extremes– weeks packed with work followed by others with almost none – at the expense of their mental health, free time, and success in school. During busier weeks, the challenge for dividing one’s time among different assignments becomes greater than ever. Instead of being able to focus on one thing and achieve success in that area, students are forced to ask themselves: “Should I study for my math test or should I finish my English paper?” This conflict can cause students to do poorly on some assignments when in reality, they just didn’t have enough time. Some may argue that time management isn’t all that hard, and that students should just buck up and bear the weight of these stressful weeks. However, we are often given short notice about assignments, and even with proper notice, too many tests can still leave students in sticky situations.
If more consideration was put into the timing of tests, there would be numerous benefits for students and teachers alike. Students could put more attention into individual assignments and perform better, rather than just throwing as much time as possible into a heaping pile of essays and tests. Teachers would then see a more realistic evaluation of a student’s knowledge. Most of all, students’ stress would decrease if their large assessments were divided up more evenly.
To improve assessment timing, I suggest creating new rules similar to the Three-Assessment Rule (if you have three major assessments in one day, you can opt to move one of them). One possible rule could be: if students have more than five assessments in a week, they can opt to move one of them to the next week. Especially leading up to breaks, where students are faced with six or seven assessments in a week, this rule could benefit the community greatly. Another possible addition could be a universal day each week where assessments are prohibited. This would give students a “day off”, allowing them to study up on assessments they have in following days.
With the faculty’s goal for this year being student wellness, poorly timed assessments is a problem that needs to be solved. However, if given enough attention, addressing this issue has the potential to benefit Pingry as a whole. It would certainly be a big step towards improving the mental health and wellness of students.