Midsemester sanity maintenance

At many schools, the middle of the semester is nearly upon us. It can be a stressful time for students and faculty alike.

If we’re giving midterm exams, we don’t really want our students to take the advice on the banner shown in this post’s image. Frankly, we’d also rather not do the professorial equivalent.

What steps can we take to lower the stress level for our students and for ourselves?

There are probably as many answers to that question as there are college teachers, but here’s what I’m doing:

• I’m providing my students with a review sheet so they know how best to focus their efforts as they prepare.
• I hold a review session before the exam. The agenda for this session is completely up to the students, and they have the review sheet in advance of this session.
• I’m not giving midterm exams in all of my courses. In one of my courses, it makes good sense to have more frequent, staggered exams. That takes some of the load off during midterms week.
• I give midterm exams in the week before Spring Break, not in the week after.
• I try to design an exam that helps students think seriously about the material they’ve learned, but that won’t take forever for me to grade. I, too, like to enjoy Spring Break, and to have some time available for uninterrupted writing. (Though of course I really ought to take Billie’s advice and commit to writing something daily, rather than waiting for big blocks of time.)
• I don’t wait until the end of the week to give the exam. That allows me to have one class session devoted to an informal conversation about how the course is going, and whether there might be any adjustments we should make. (A colleague of mine has been doing this kind of informal midterm evaluation for a while; I’ll be trying it for the first time next week.)

That’s what I’ll be doing next week. What strategies do you have for yourself and your students during midterms? Let’s hear about them in the comments.

[The image in this post is a CC-licensed photo by Flickr user ecastro.]