At 9:04 a.m. on a Tuesday, professors around the university announced their fourth midterms of the semester. Nobody panicked. Experts say that’s how you know it’s too late.
Scientists cannot explain how a semester with one beginning and one end can sustain four middles. The university can, and it would like you to stop asking.
The first sign was subtle. In September, professors announced midterm exams. In October, another. By November, students refreshing Canvas at 11:59 p.m. understood, with a cold clarity, that the semester had grown a second “halfway” point, then a third.
“I asked when things would calm down,” a student said, requesting anonymity because of a Thursday midterm. “An administrator told me, ‘After midterms.’ I asked “which ones?” He said ‘yes.’”
Our investigation led to the creation of the Department of Temporal Assessment committee, a 14-member staff that has never met before noon and has never, to our knowledge, seen the sun. Their 86-page report concludes that a midterm is not defined by when it happens, but by its “relationship to the learning process.” Translation: it’s a midterm if a professor feels like testing you. The committee also rejects the word “test” as “unnecessarily evaluative.”
The department then spent a full year studying whether midterms could occur after finals. It postponed its findings twice, then scheduled a midterm to assess its progress.
Sources were able to trace the problem back to a 2020 efficiency initiative. Its name: MIDTERM-OS.
The software measures the gap between how prepared you are and how prepared your professor wants you to be. When the gap gets big enough, MIDTERM-OS generates an exam. The flaw is that students are never prepared enough, so the software spits out midterms almost indefinitely. Nobody can find the off switch, mostly because nobody can find the person who installed it. The terms of service do note that the academic calendar is “merely advisory.”
The system has since reclassified students’ quizzes, papers and at least one oral presentation as “midterms.” Finals are now “post-midterm consolidation assessments.” Students who pass are flagged for “additional verification of competence,” since success these days is a little far-fetched.
“MIDTERM-OS generated 12 midterms for me last Friday,” Sprinkles McCramsworth said, a junior majoring in applied procrastination. “My professors greeted me with a placid smile and a bluebook.”
On campus, the effects are everywhere. The library has converted The Mother Rosalie Room into an escape for students to cry; the Harry Potter room has been renamed to “multidisciplinary wellness space.” The bookstore now offers a scantron subscription. Students no longer introduce themselves by major, only by status: taken, studying or just found out. “After midterm” is now a historical expression, like “before the internet.”
At a press conference, a spokesperson praised the exams as proof of “an institutional commitment to continuous learning.”
“How can there be four midterms?” a student-reporter asked.
“We reject the assumption that time must be linear.”
“Isn’t the semester only 16 weeks?”
“We prefer to think of it as more of an abstract series of learning opportunities.”
“Will students have fewer exams next semester?”
“Actually, we are pleased to announce a fifth midterm, designed to assess student resilience.”
One sophomore proposed a radical fix: call an exam an exam! The idea was tabled pending a feasibility study on whether the word could be used “without compromising the mission of preparing students for an unpredictable future.” A second proposal, one midterm per class, was rejected for creating an “unacceptable gap in assessment” and risking “unmonitored personal growth.”
Let’s name some honest reforms here: the “Denial Assessment,” the “Existential Checkpoint” (tests both course material and what remains of your identity), the “Academic Reckoning” (held the same day three other classes schedule exams) and the “Midterm of Syllabi,” which has been revised so often that no one can say whether it’s the exam stated on the syllabus or not.
Last week, the university announced the crisis was solved. All future exams will be classified as midterms, ending the terminology debate. Administrators called it a landmark in academic efficiency, noting that students will no longer need to remember which midterm they’re studying for, since all of them are equally important.
The calendar is now technically accurate. The problem has still not changed.
That is the part that should worry us. Nobody is arguing against exams. Assessment exists to serve learning. But when an institution renames its contradictions instead of fixing them, people slowly stop noticing there is anything to fix. A word starts to matter more than the thing it describes, and “that’s just how it works” begins to sound like an answer.
An additional midterm has been scheduled to assess student acceptance of the midterm policy. It will take place during finals week.
It is, according to the syllabus, a midterm.
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