During students’ second year of high school, sophomores are expected to complete multiple difficult exams, with some students forced to take EOCs on top of AP Exams. Some exams are scheduled less than a week apart. Those exams include Biology, Geometry, American History, and two days of English testing, including all AP exams for those who have to take AP classes.

With the amount of testing these students are put through, it can feel next to impossible to maintain studying for multiple EOC’s (End of Course Exams) while also completing school work, projects, and extracurriculars like sports and clubs, while maintaining their lives outside of school.

On top of this, each day there is an exam, sophomores are expected to come in at 7:30 a.m. and test till 9:35 a.m. and then go throughout their entire rest of the school day drained from testing and lack of sleep from studying the night prior to the exam, while the rest of the students who are not sophomores, not taking the EOC or riding the bus are able to sleep in and come into school two hours later than the students who took the EOC.

Lauren Ross, a Guidance Counselor at WHS (Wadsworth High School), believes that students have struggled both in the past and present regarding EOCs.

“I think there has been [an] ongoing conversation throughout the state of Ohio regarding the number of tests and particularly related to geometry,” Ross said. “I would say that their teachers do a phenomenal job preparing them for the actual content and the material in the exams, but it’s more just testing fatigue. I think the disruption to the regular school day and the feeling of having to manage preparing for other classes that may or may not have exams, and then the disruption on top of the actual testing itself; it is a lot, and it’s a big ask for sophomores.”

According to a Harvard Study, high-stakes state testing increases student cortisol levels by an average of 15%, spiking to 35% in disadvantaged populations; chronic pressure causes physiological stress that hinders memory and recall, often creating an overwhelming task response that results in lower test performance.

“I believe that the overall system should be reworked to fit an average sophomore student’s end of course exam testing schedule that won’t cause them stress to the point of scoring bad on the exams, and so it’s evened out between multiple grades to be more fair for sophomores to give them that opportunity to score well,” Ross said.

Evan Johnston, a sophomore at WHS, expressed how he feels the pressure of EOCs, and believes that it can be fixed into a new system.

“[For] some EOCs, I was already taking an AP exam for, so it seemed kind of redundant,” Johnston said. “It was stressful [overall] because it was a quick turnaround on the days to be able to take AP tests and then take EOCs.”

Adding onto what Johnston said, another primary reason that the amount of EOCs cause stress to sophomores the most are that they have to pass them in order to graduate, adding to the tension and pressure when studying for the amount of subjects they will test on for all of the EOCs.

“I already have to stress over AP which is a whole other beast, on top of the pressures of having to pass the State-issued EOCS stressed me out even more knowing that I had to pass every single one of them to graduate, but also pass all of my AP exams to gain the college credits for the class,” Johnston said.

It is the same for every grade, where if a student does not pass an End of Course Exam, they will have to miss school time and retake it the following year for another opportunity to be able to graduate, and that alone having to remember information of a whole subject a year later after many breaks seems next to impossible with the lengths of work that a student is already working on a grade above where they used to be.

Spreading out the tests between the years could benefit sophomore students regarding their mental health, for example the school could give the English EOC for the student’s freshman or junior year. Also, The school board overall could possibly work out a new plan for sophomores scheduled to take EOC and AP exams that would lessen their work-load.