By Kallandra Weatherbee
There is growing anxiety on campus with finals fast approaching, except this year final exams are looking different.
Finals week is already stressful for many students, and switching how their tests are done isn’t helping. All final exams at NAIT will be moved online.
One student is already feeling the pressure as test dates arrive.
“It’s definitely a lot different with everything being online. It’s a lot harder juggling all the different assignments that we have now on top of having to learn the course material. It’s really been difficult to balance all that,” said NAIT business student Simran Aulakh.
On top of finals, students have more online assignments and classes they need to manage.
“There’s all these added assignments that when I’ve talked to people who had previously taken the course they hadn’t heard of them,” said Aulakh.
Another stress for finals is how students are preparing for exams. While not being able to go to classes some feel they’re missing out on resources that helped them in previous years.
“We have recorded lectures and it’s nice we can go back to those but usually we’re in class. They usually give us more handouts and extra practice questions and more worksheets and we haven’t gotten any of those,” said Aulakh.
Aulakh also feels additional pressure as she has to teach herself a lot of the course material.
“It’s been a lot harder actually as we kind of have to teach ourselves the course material, our professors have kinda been like ‘here’s the recorded lecture watch them, don’t watch them…’ they don’t really give us any additional resources either.”
Aulakh feels additional resources for classes and final exams would be beneficial in helping students deal with stress for the winter term.
“I feel like professors could be doing a lot more to help us out. In some of my classes I’ve been emailing some of my professors my questions and they don’t really give straight answers back. They just say go watch the lectures,” said Aulakh.
Although finals will still cause some stress there are some tips to help make taking online tests easier:
Try a virtual study session
Make sure to sleep at least 8 hours
Have a snack and a glass of water before your test.
NAIT and NAITSA have a variety of online tutoring and online counselling sessions to help bring stress levels down during this testing period.
