In Patrick O'Malley's essay "More Testing, More Learning," he claims that frequently test improves students' learning. As O'Malley points out the majority of college professors only take two test to challenge students' ability in class, midterm and final. O'Malley believes students get so nervous and anxious because midterm and final hold a huge part of their grade and they know there will be no other chance to make it up and increase their grades. So O'Malley proposes that professors need to give more frequent brief exams. In this way, students would learn more efficiently, study more regularly, and have less anxiety. O'Malley points out that frequent exams can be a good opportunity for professors to include the challenging and more important problems in the exam and for students to take the exam and think on those problem and even after the exam look for the answers and it helps them to learn the lesson. Which means, it worth it to take a few minutes of the lecture and take a brief exam and for grading them O'Malley suggests to have readers or teaching assistants to do that for professors and or multiple-choice exams so they can just put all the Scantrons in the machine and get all the grades back in five minutes. .
Considering O'Malley's point of view I should say frequent test is not as good as he says. What O'Malley says might be a good solution and it might be as efficient as he believes but only in one class. If we look at the bigger picture; as a fulltime student that is taking five classes all together having an exam every week for each one of them will be too stressful and hard to handle and manage. It is against the first problem that students have with just having two exams for the whole semester and the fact that it is stressful as O'Malley states. Having frequent exam can cause constant pressure and stress it might not be as much stress as having two major exams but it is continuous and that is not an ideal situation for a college student that is full time and also those ones that even have a part time job beside college.
