It’s that time again. You’ve spent all of the previous weeks of spring quarter studying up to this point and hope that you’ve prepared yourself enough to at least pass all your exams.
You take the exams and get through all of them with what are probably varying degrees of difficulty, and then the waiting starts.
Aside from finals week, weeks five and six of Drexel’s quarters tend to be the most stressful for students, as this is when the bulk of the midterm exams take place, unless you get one of those classes that has them in weeks four or seven.
The exams can be brutal, but it can also be troublesome to wait to receive a grade. There’s a level of anxiety that always kicks in post-exam and it can be almost as stress-inducing as studying for and taking the test was. Sometimes you will get your grade back immediately with online exams, but for most exams you don’t receive a grade for a few days or even a week in some cases. There are some people who can just take an exam and not be worried about it at all afterwards, but most people have at least some anxiety.
This anxiety is completely normal, though. Why shouldn’t you be a little anxious about a test that was worth 30 percent of your final grade? Especially if you didn’t know the answers to all the questions or didn’t feel confident in your answers?
It’s okay to be a bit worried, but it’s not okay to panic. Maybe you can start to panic if you think you bombed the exam and if you’ve gone two weeks and still haven’t received a grade, but even then, I wouldn’t advise it.
Because Drexel’s quarter system is like a marathon, there’s no time to be stopping on the side at the halfway point to catch your breath. As nice as that would be, you can’t stop until you reach the finish line. Being worried about a midterm after you’ve taken it won’t do you any favors. It’ll cause you unneeded stress and possibly affect your studying when you need to have as clear a mind as possible to study for finals.
The best way to not fret over an exam after taking it is to do things that will take your mind off it. I always hang out with friends after I’ve taken an exam and that completely prevents me from worrying about it. This may not work for everyone, so you need to do whatever it is that you find most effective for taking your mind off the exam you took.
The stress from studying and taking exams is already bad enough, so don’t add more to that stress by worrying about them after the fact. You’ll be doing yourself a favor if you just move on to the next assignment and focus on doing your best to pass all your courses.