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By Thomas Gessner
I don’t have to explain what a midterm is to college students. Or do I? Personally, I find the term and usage quite confusing. Now, it shouldn’t be confusing; it’s the middle of the term, and that is when an exam of some sort is given on the material learned up until that point. All of this makes perfect sense, and if college professors and universities followed this definition, I wouldn’t be writing a blog about midterms, but here we are.
Let’s break my schedule down to show why I am confused about all of this. My semester began in mid-January and I had my first midterm towards the end of February, so already there is a problem. The semester ends in mid-May, but my first midterm wasn’t even close to two months into classes, so what’s the deal? I thought, “Well, maybe there are more classes in the first two months of the semester, so everything evens out and the exam truly is in the middle.” I wasn’t even mad at this point. In fact, I was willing to believe that I had made a mistake and that the midterm was near the middle of the semester, but boy was I wrong. After my first midterm, I moseyed on over to my syllabi for my other classes to find my other midterm dates, assuming I would have to ramp up my studying to prepare for the slew of exams in the coming week. So imagine my surprise when I looked at my other midterm dates and saw they were all almost a month later! Okay, so my first class with the February midterm must have just been weird and out of pocket. Maybe there was some scheduling issue or something else that caused this midterm to not be in the middle of the semester. Then, I looked just a little bit closer at what was already in front of me, and I discovered the perpetrator in all of this. This class had two damn midterms. Two. Listen, I’m not upset at this fact because there are two exams instead of one, I’m upset because they are both called midterms. Based on the definition of the word, along with common sense, there can only be one midterm, because there can only be one middle of something, like a semester for example. To really hammer my point home, imagine you are running in a race on a trail and you reach a marker labeled as the halfway point, then after a while you reach another marker that also claims itself as the halfway point. Despite there being two halfway markers, that does not mean there are two middles of the race. When I am watching a two hour movie and stop it at an hour in, that is the middle; when I stop the movie 40 minutes then at 80 minutes, the movie doesn’t have two middles. I realize that these examples are just me bashing the concept of two midterms based solely on the simplistic, broken down definition of the word “middle”, but my God there are so many words in the human language that can be used, like “test”, “exam”, “quiz”, to name the obvious ones. And you the reader are probably asking, “Well, what if your professor has to have a midterm but wants two big exams before the final?” It’s actually not that complicated. If you have to give a midterm, then give a midterm, a singular midterm, not two, and if for some reason you don’t have to give a midterm, then give two tests and call them major tests or exams or whatever, just not midterms. As silly as this all sounds, and it is beyond silly that I am complaining like this, I will say that words and definitions matter a lot to me, especially pertaining to their usage in everyday life. At the risk of sounding even more pretentious, a quote from George Orwell’s 1984 that remains relevant (not just to midterms, but still) states: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” People need words and vocabulary to better think; without a wide range of words, it becomes more challenging to differentiate between ideas, concepts, and physical things. Let’s imagine that the only word to describe something good was “good”. If there is no other word or variation of “good” that can be used, then the human brain will have trouble classifying things that it finds to be well, good. Because of that, everything called good is placed on the same level. There is no nuance whatsoever between each “good” thing since the exact same word is used every single time. Okay, so I made my point about why myself and George Orwell care about words and language, but I swear it all ties back to the idea of a midterm and how professors and teachers are hopelessly twisting the definition to mean any exam that is not the final for the course. I pray our society does not reach a point where every examination is called a midterm, like if athletes took drug midterms, or someone gets "midtermed" for chlamydia. I like midterm as a word, in fact I like it so much I’ve used it an inordinate number of times, which could very well be detrimental to my whole argument here, but nevertheless, my point stands that the word midterm should be protected, and not used to describe tests that don’t occur in the middle of something. At the end of the day, there aren’t two middles, so we should stop acting like it. ● The Recommended Content Widget will appear here on the published site.
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3/16/2021
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