Published: May 18, 2009 01:45 am      

The finals frontier

Surviving seven days of stress

Finals.

Seven days that could make or break your semester. A botched final could drop your grade a letter or worse and a particularly brilliant exam could be the boost your GPA needs after a less-than-impressive semester. It’s no surprise that finals are a stressful time for students. But instead of cramming and staying up for several days straight, guzzling taurine and swilling caffeine, the key to success during finals week is how you handle that stress.

“Finals can be very stressful. You feel like that there’s lot to lose,” said Paul Lindsay, West Virginia University junior. “Your grades could all drop after finals week.”

A popular way to handle the tightly-packed gauntlet of tests is to cram. Most students average four to six finals during finals week, leaving them with few options other than to pack their studying time in the span of a few days.

“Freshman year I had all my finals on the same day,” said Brandon Doss, WVU senior. “It wasn’t that bad because they were freshman, entry-level classes and it was nice to get them all out of the way at once, but it was a hell of a Sunday-Monday-Tuesday.”

Although one might assume that studying the day before a test would keep the information fresh in one’s memory, studies have shown that the brain is able to retain information longer if studying is spread out over time. Nonstop studying can leave your mind foggy, so a 15-minute break every two hours can go a long way in keeping your mind sharp.

Worse yet, cramming is only a short-term memory aid. That may be fine for the finals, but if you take a class later on that builds on that material, then you’ll find yourself at a disadvantage.

“My whole sleeping pattern is off because I’ll start studying at 6 p.m. until 3 in the morning. Then I get up late and then it repeats all over,” said Angela Brunacardi, WVU College of Law graduate student. “So I lose a lot of sleep.”

Any sleep can be a boon to your final grade. Although you might not be able to get the eight hours that you’d like, a few hours of sleep is ultimately better than no sleep. That power nap is much more valuable to you than that extra studying time

Diet is key to keeping your body and mind limber. A sugary snack, preferably fruit, every hour will deliver a steady supply of glucose to your brain that will keep your energy levels high while studying. To stay healthy, however, you’ll need a balance of proteins and carbohydrates. Stress weakens the immune system and catching a cold is the last thing you want while trying to prepare for finals.

My final bit of advice is, next time, to not approach finals like its anything special. The best way to handle finals week, obviously enough, is to study throughout the semester. The material will have been engraved into your mind and your study workload will be significantly decreased.

Of course, that’s a lot easier than it sounds.