Tests: a major contributor to the stress that comes along with high school. In hopes of eliminating stress and sleepless nights, CHS has created a testing schedule for departments to follow. Each department has specific days of the week they are allowed to schedule summative tests on. This way, students won’t have an excessive amount of tests on the same day. While in theory it works, this is not always the case.

Many teachers have found loopholes to this by scheduling tests in the formative category, which are worth fewer points, or just ignore the schedule all together.

With such a competitive environment at CHS, numbers are always a popular topic of discussion. Whether it be how many AP classes you are taking, your overall grade in a class, your SAT/ACT score or what you earned on that latest English paper, numbers have been fueling stress for years.

Given the rigorous course loads many CHS students decide to take on, it is especially important for students to decompress and focus on their mental health too.

Cramming for what feels like your hardest tests for your hardest classes the night before is anything but an ideal situation. Without teachers following a testing schedule, many students are left having many of their most challenging tests scheduled all for the same day.

According to a 2017 study by Science Daily, it was found that around 40 percent of teenagers currently sleep less than seven hours a night.

Both for students’ mental and physical health, it is crucial that they get the sleep they need, which in many cases, prevents stress from happening.

At a certain point, stress is inevitable. We, as students, are bound to encounter it time after time again. On the other hand, it is important to ask ourselves, is putting ourselves in stress inducing situations necessarily bad?

Having a long night consisting of flashcards, practice problems and endless of hours studying along with the next day walking from class to class, test after test, is not the most appealing situation. However, it does have positives such as learning to plan ahead, not cram the night before and other important time management skills.

While in most cases, stress has a negative connotation associated with it, stress can be good for you. According to a 2018 New York Times article, “the human stress response, in and of itself, can put the brain and body in an optimal position to perform.”

High school is intended to prepare us for whatever our next chapter holds. Without properly learning how to manage our time and stress, this will become a reoccuring theme. It is important for CHS students to find a balance. Finding a balance between pulling all-nighters each day to study and having no more than one test a day due to a schedule is the best way to prepare us for the future.