Study Guides Prepare and Reduce Anxiety for Final Exams: Why professors should be required to distribute study guides for exams.

As the semester comes to an end, many students are preparing for finals week. This is one of the most stressful weeks in a college student’s life because of the multiple exams they have to take in a week. Most exams at Eastern are cumulative and require students to remember a lot of information that could be hard to recall or even prepare beforehand. Professors should provide students with study guides to reduce stress and uncertainty about these exams.

College is already a difficult time for student’s mental health. Between the constant assignments, balancing a social life and working, it can seem overwhelming when a student needs to prepare for exams that have no direction to it. Study guides are a great way to show students what professors expect of them and help them better prepare for an exam that impacts their grade heavily.

Providing a study guide will help students better understand the material as well. When you are stressed out about something, it is easy to focus more on the stress rather than what you need to learn. Many students focus on just memorizing the material and then disregard it later in life because they know it can make or break their final grade in a class. Study guides will give them a sense of direction and will help them feel less stressed.

Many students are thankful and relieved when professors create a study guide for any type of test, especially finals or midterms. When you are told you are expected to know everything but have nothing to go off of besides notes and handouts, it can be overwhelming and having that done in multiple classes makes it worse. While stress is a part of a college student’s life, I think study guides should be created to help students better understand the material and reduce anxiety. 

When you know what to expect and what types of questions or problems will be on an exam, stress levels can decrease and performance can go up. I know that many students feel that they are more organized when they have study guides. Tamalei Sharp, a sophomore at Eastern University, believes that professors who provide a study guide help their students’ mental health because they know what is covered and it helps students stress less. 

Hannah Wilson, a freshman at Eastern, thinks that it would be beneficial to students to have study guides provided to reduce the stress of trying to study everything. Many other students agree that they feel a lot more comfortable when study guides are provided before exams. 

Many people suffer from test anxiety, which means they can perform badly on a test even if they studied for hours. Providing study guides can help boost performance on exams because students know what to expect and will learn more about the subject. I believe that professors should provide students with study guides so that they can understand the material better and feel less overwhelmed during a very stressful time in their lives.