Contrary to popular opinion, midterms are not a horrendous fire-breathing dragon sent to torture students during the frigid month of January.

Though difficult to admit, midterms do serve an important purpose: they force students to actually learn the material they may have forgotten since September.

The current educational system encourages students to achieve perfect grades, not necessarily learn the material they are being taught.  It encourages students’ desire to get A’s more than to ask question and fully understand.  Therefore, the common student mindset is, “I just need to pass this unit,” instead of, “I need to understand this material.” As a result, cramming, memorizing, and a lack of learning ensues.

Midterms combat this mindset.  They provide a setting of review to teachers and students alike. They force students to revisit what they learned and to go back and understand it for a second time.  They also show teachers what they need to review, and what their students truly understood. To put it simply, midterms validate and reinforce the material students learned.

But in a system that praises perfect grades, the educational value midterms provide is greatly depleted by the fact that the scoring process is extremely unfair to students’ GPAs.

Algonquin’s grading system has midterm scores directly factored into students’ term two grades. This midterm makes up a considerable fraction of students’ grades for the entire term, and, as a result, that one grade can impact students’ term two grades drastically.  This system is not fair to those students who did not do exceptionally well in term one, but then excelled in term two. It is also not fair to all the winter athletes who have to study in between games, after practices, on the bus, and who, as a result of this lack of study time, might not be able to achieve the best midterm grades.  Term two grades should reflect the progress and hard work put into the term, not the results of one gigantic test.  This system is unfair to the student body and is simply unacceptable.

The solution to this debacle is simple: midterms should be factored into a student’s overall grade, just like finals.  At other schools, midterms are worth just as much as final exams, they appear in a separate category on report cards, and they are factored into students’ overall grade.  With this system, each term would be worth 20 percent of students’ grades while the final and mandatory midterm would each be worth 10 percent. This system allows students’ term two grades to truly reflect the work put into term two, instead of just reflecting a midterm result.  With this system, fairness would be factored back into students’ grades.

So yes, midterms are indeed necessary in order to preserve the small part of the educational system that makes us learn, understand, and become a little bit smarter.  But at the same time, this scoring system is outrageously unfair to students and their term two grades.  So although the midterms themselves are not a torturous fire breathing dragon, their grading system does indeed represent a horrific reptilian, and it needs to be challenged and changed.