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Midterm Madness

    There is a common stereotype that all abroad programs and courses are a complete joke— I’m here to dispel that misconception! Depending on the program, your courses could be the easiest you’ll ever take, or potentially even harder than a GW course. I would say that the courses at my school fall somewhere in between. I definitely thought that they would be easier than they actually are. In fact, the courses that seemed the easiest (humanities) turned out to be the most difficult and required extra preparation.
       Not only are the classes more difficult than I assumed, but they are graded very differently than GW courses. At GW, we have portions of our grade that goes towards homework, midterm, final, and attendance. In most of my classes, our final itself is 50-70% of our grade, 15-40% midterm, and 10-15% is attendance. In other words, you have significantly fewer assignments, however you also have only two opportunities to do well in the class which, in my opinion, is a worse than the former.
       Lastly, and most importantly, our finals are for the most part all written take-home papers. This sounds ideal however all of the classes have these papers due within the same week which will be very stressful. To best prepare for these tests or papers, you must be cognizant of their deadlines and start working on them as soon as you’re given a prompt.
       Midterms are over for me and I’m finally on Passover break! I’ll be spending my travels in Europe and will have many more stories for my blog very soon! Ciao for now!