The last time I took a proper, sit-down, “I-really-need-to-know-this-or-things-will-go-very-poorly-for-me” midterm exam was fall 2024, my senior year of undergrad. It’s not that I haven’t taken a midterm since. Last fall, I took a take-home exam for PHYSICS 262: General Relativity (GR), which — I promise — I completed unaided, abiding by the Stanford University honor code. But it just wasn’t the same. 

There’s something liminal about the feeling of sitting in an exam room where everyone is coughing for some reason. Time is somehow simultaneously sub- and ultra-relativistic (see, I remember GR). You watch as people get up one by one to turn in their exams well before time is called, while you’re still on the first problem. Ouch. 

I’m the type of person to enjoy a well-written exam. In fact, I still remember a midterm where one could bypass two pages of calculations by using raising and lowering operators (a nifty quantum mechanics trick for the uninitiated) — genius! 

However, I’ve also always been the type to forget the entire exam the second I turn it in. I genuinely think I enter some alternate plane of existence whenever I am asked to “describe and calculate the hydrodynamic instabilities in the bullet cluster” (Rayleigh-Taylor and Kelvin Helmholtz) or wax poetic about whether Genghis Khan was a militaristic genius (he was). Then, I turn in my exam and go about the rest of my day, attending to the piles of work I’d been ignoring for the past couple weeks.

Of course, the same cannot be said about life on the other side of the curtain. As a proctor, the dread from the passing of another 15 minutes of exam time gets replaced with the relief of being 15 minutes closer to literally anything but standing in a room where everyone is staring at you.

My high school physics teacher used to start every exam with a monologue where she would say, “You may look up for inspiration, down in desperation.” Now, standing at the front of the room, I see a lot of inspiration and desperation.

When you’re taking a midterm, turning in the exam means you’re done. When proctoring, a turned-in exam means writing down the student’s name and exam number, making sure they turned in every part of their exam and checking that they didn’t steal the provided four-function calculator.

Stanford physics classes have these things called “grading parties,” which are not fun-filled ragers as the name suggests, but rather the act of sitting in a room for five to six hours and grading exams. My friends and I have often left physics exams joking that we created new physics in our answers… Well, let me tell you, Maxwell himself couldn’t have fathomed the ways decades of PHYSICS 23, 43 and 81 students have reconstructed his equations. As TAs, we feel like we’re doing the reading comprehension portion of the SATs. I’ve seen the five stages of grief intertwined with haphazardly drawn Gaussian surfaces.

While a midterm happens in the most isolated environment possible, grading is anything but. It’s passing my laptop around the room trying to figure out if a student’s chicken scratch does indeed correctly say “electric field at infinity equals zero.” It’s the whole room erupting into cheers when a student finally gets a full score on a question. It’s seeing your students’ exams and groaning in agony when they forget the one thing you explicitly told them not to.

Perhaps the worst part of grading an exam is your students knowing you graded the exam. One time last year, I was journaling at a table by the Green Library Coupa when one of my students waved at me from a few tables down. Moments later, my phone buzzed with “New Assignment Created” immediately followed by “Assignment Grade Posted.”

A few tables down, I saw my student take out their phone and stare at it in silenced shock. They picked up their bag and left, back turned, gaze averted and head hung low. Despite not having taken the exam, I felt myself tense by muscle memory. The feeling of disappointment and embarrassment doesn’t go away, regardless of your role. It’s hard being an empath.

Exams aren’t all bad, though. Having taken millions of midterms over the last half a decade, my test-taking method is tried and true. It’s as follows: show up early enough to find a good seat — near the back, ideally by a window — but not too early that you start getting anxious. Headphones on is a must! No reason to let other people’s nerves get to you.

Arrange on your desk, from left to right: your mechanical pencil, for writing; pen with a non-traditional color of ink, for commentary, emphasis and/or annotating; and eraser, in that order. Before starting the exam, glasses off and hair up in a messy bun. This may not work for my far-sighted friends. 

My last quirk is that, sometimes, I will bring a small stuffed animal with me for emotional support. There’s nothing in the honor code that forbids it, and it adds some whimsy to an otherwise stressful atmosphere. What more, your proctor might get a chuckle when they look over and see a tiny hedgehog sitting on your desk.

This also extends to grading. A small stuffed animal will improve a grading party by at least 50%. This is a scientific fact. Another scientific fact is that a sweet treat after taking or grading midterms will improve your mood by at least 50%.

Feel free to borrow, steal or otherwise pull from my strategy. I cannot guarantee any success, but if I ever proctor one of your exams and see you with a small stuffed animal, I’ll give you a nod in solidarity.