By the Boiling Point Editorial Board

Tests are never popular. When they’re oversized, cumulative, and count for 15 percent of your grade, they’re outright hated. Therefore, when the administration first announced that midterm exams would be cancelled for the 2014-15 school year – for the second year in a row – students were overjoyed. Without midterms, the last-minute cramming and late-night study sessions that frequent January would become history at long last

Yet when the end of first semester approached, it became apparent that there was an evil more vile than midterm exams: midterm assignments. In lieu of the normal end-of-semester testing, many teachers assigned massive projects, leaving students saddled with up to 9 of these time-gobbling monsters. And unlike midterm exams, where there’s a week beforehand exclusively dedicated to studying and review –no other homework allowed — students were expected to complete these projects on top of learning new material and doing regular homework.

Faced with huge workloads, many had to dedicate their entire December vacations to working, from researching the properties of energy drinks for Advance Biology to writing a spread on Charlemagne for World History. And while it was a nice gesture on the part of some teachers to move the deadlines of their projects to the middle of semester break in January, the result was that some students ended up spending both vacations slaving away, which in our opinion is not okay. Kids need a break.

In the end, while we liked not having end-of-semester exams, the alternative was disastrous. If the school plans on continuing the trend of ditching midterms, it should reform how it regulates cumulative projects. The administration should put limits on how large these projects can be, or, better yet, it should only allow a certain number of classes to assign them at any one time.

If the system’s not fixed, going back to having midterm exams would be better, no matter how despised they are.