In And Around Language: "Midterm"

Please sit down. We’re passing out booklets now. You should have a question sheet and two booklets. Raise your hand if you—sorry about that James, there you go. You’ll have 53 minutes; there are four sections. We’ve included a suggested time for each section. I’ll also keep track of how much time is left on the board. And...begin.

These days, midterm season encompasses nearly the entire semester. Some classes have two or three midterms. Right now, between Somerville and Allston, an evil and innovative professor is devising a syllabus with four midterms.

Surely there’s a rule against this kind of cruelty in the dictionary. It is a midterm, as in middle of the term, and there aren’t three middles, except maybe in abstract math. Merriam-Webster confirms that a midterm is “an examination given at the middle of a school term.” Not two examinations.

Americans apparently invented the idea. The British definitional authority, the Oxford English Dictionary, dates the first usage of midterm to 1456: “Thair lord suld..geve thaim sum part [of their pay] in the myd terme.” Perhaps the next campaign for the UC could be replacing midterm exams with a mid-semester festival where University President Drew G. Faust hands out dollar bills to puzzled students.

Harvard was way behind the curve on adopting midterms. On April 10, 1892, students at the State Normal School in Albany took midterm examinations. “Never in the history of the college,” wrote the New York Tribune, “has there been more earnest and effective work.” That same week Harvard students took a spring recess, rowing boats on the Charles for their “vacation athletic activity.”

The first usage of midterm referring to a university examination came just a few years earlier in 1889. Horace Davis, the president of the University of California, was to blame. He thought final examinations were “a poor way of finding out” whether a student is learning. Yes! Abolish finals!

Davis continued, “The daily recitation is a better test of...progress.” While it would be hilarious to watch 900 freshmen recite the definition of Net Export Demand to a grinning Greg Mankiw, rote learning has been largely discredited. Maybe Davis didn’t know what he was talking about. “When instruction is by lectures solely, mid-term or monthly off-hand examinations are more efficient.” Monthly? Davis resigned the next year, sparing California undergraduates of further harm.

But his words do suggest a potential solution to today’s linguistic contradiction of multiple midterms. Professors could return to Davis’s more specific formulation and administer “monthly off-hand examinations.” It is a softer phrase, with the extra syllables, the hyphen, and the “off” implying a certain casualness to something that will determine 30 percent of your grade.

Already professors differ on their terminology. In Math 55 and Physics 15b, there are two “midterms.” In Ec10, there are two “exams” that occur during the middle of the semester. In most of my classes, there are “no exams,” because I study the humanities.

I did take one recently, writing down all the facts I could remember about the late Roman Empire in a little white book. The color of the books sometimes is blue, and briefly in 1990, turned yellow for financial reasons, which led to a hyperbolic article in The Crimson about the “psychological implications” of a brighter hue.

Next fall, the University should consider replacing the blue books with red ones, since the Republicans will probably win the midterm elections. And that’s the final definition of the word. Time’s up.