It’s midnight, and in the morning, you have a big test. 

The stress you feel at this moment is like no other. What do you study? There’s so much to do and such little time. 

You have two options: stay up all night, study, go to school exhausted, and somehow take the test. Or, fall asleep and just take the test the next time you have the class. That gives you more time to study, and your friends can tell you what’s on it. 

It’s not a secret that a portion of students unfortunately tend to pivot towards the second direction, often skipping school to avoid taking tests. This issue has become prominent, especially at Rock Ridge High School. In the 2023-2024 school year, 19.16 percent of students were chronically absent for 10 percent or more of the year. 

Why is this issue so common? What pushes students towards skipping school on test days? Most importantly, can this action be justified? 

To tackle the question of why students skip school on test days in the first place, we need to understand the general approach and consensus of tests according to students. 

Tests, due to their intense and negative nature, are a sore spot for most students. The pressure placed on students to succeed on these timed assessments is severe, as a lot of subjects have end-of-unit tests rather than projects and presentations. A couple of mistakes could lower one’s grade, which is something that no one wants. “What a test is, it’s basically a measure of what they [students] know and what they’ve learned, but that translates to a grade,” freshman Bhavagnya Pallaki said. “So when they take a test, they get really stressed out about it. They get really worried about what they’ll get, what their score will be, and how that will reflect on their grade. So, some people will get really stressed when they’re taking a test, and tend to avoid it.”

Testing environments themselves are also heavily anxiety-inducing. The time constraints, the quietness, the air in the room — it all causes an explosive bomb of nerves. In this environment, it is easy for students to panic and experience something called testing anxiety. Testing anxiety is a phenomenon where strong emotions of doubt and nervousness cloud a student’s thinking process during an assessment, compromising their ability to perform well. “Some people, while they’re taking tests, they always say that everything just left their brains,” freshman Khanak Kothari said. “I think that’s what causes people to stress out, cause while they’re taking their test, they’re like, ‘Wait I studied this, but I can’t remember it’, because of how stressed they are.”

Testing anxiety is only compounded when the fear factor of how tests determine so much for students is included. Tests can break or make your grade, and one too many mistakes on an assessment can doom you. For students who blank out or face test anxiety, this means trouble. Even for students who don’t struggle with test taking, feeling unprepared or not understanding the material before a test is nerve-racking, as doing badly is out of the question. “The biggest overarching fear [for me] is failing a test, which is like a reality; it can happen,” freshman Sriram Chiripurapu said. 

“There’s two main reasons [as to why students skip on test days],” Chrirpurapu said. “One, because they feel as if they are not prepared, and the other reason is because maybe they think the teacher hasn’t taught them enough, which [they then feel like] they have to skip and learn more.” Stress, pressure to succeed, fear of failure, and being unprepared — these are the core reasons why students skip on test days. All of these factors are overwhelming and emotionally draining. This leads to the important discussion of whether or not students skipping test days is justified. 

“Honestly, some people might mentally need it [skipping test days],” Kothari said. “If you have back-to-back tests, like I get that you don’t want to take them [due to the stress], and that’s why you might skip class.” 

“It’s an academic strategy that’s built off of a mental health necessity, it’s sort of a combination of both,” Chriripurapu said. “The overarching problem is that students don’t want their grades to fall, and I feel like a strategy that they might employ is skipping tests.”

Although it is understandable that students might engage in skipping tests as a strategy used to alleviate stress, that still does not fully justify the action. Skipping on test days is not a reasonable action, but the issue behind why students utilize it is a very real problem. What is important is that measures are taken to ensure that students do not feel overwhelmed under the immense pressure of academics and are able to seek help and cope with the stress in more beneficial ways. 

One of the best ways to solve this issue is by enhancing student-teacher communication. By talking to their teachers about any doubts they may have prior to a test, students can resolve a lot of nerves they may have. Teachers should work to actively create an environment within their classrooms where students do not feel stressed to the extent that they skip school, and students should talk to their teachers whenever they feel overwhelmed about an assessment. 

Parents should also responsibly communicate with their children and assist them in managing and handling their stress in healthy ways instead of enabling them to skip school. Midnight strikes on this issue only when students feel enough security in their lives from their teachers and parents to be empowered and sure of themselves the night before a test.