Many of us don’t need to be reminded that there’s only a few days left before exam season starts, but we might need a reminder to make time for a nice home cooked meal. It’s easy to turn to buying lunch or dinner when you’re tight on time during these next few weeks, but there are ways to make cooking an enjoyable experience while relieving some stress too.
The Sil staff have compiled their favourite recipes that are easy to make, especially when you’re short on time. We encourage you to try them out, change up the ingredients and most importantly, take the time to take care of yourself this season.
Shared by Sasha Dhesi (Managing Editor)
Pasta is a staple batch recipe since it’s fairly easy, delicious and lasts the whole work week. While most people don’t have time to make homemade pasta, students don’t have to rely on jarred sauces and compromise their time.
Making a sauce at home can seem challenging, but simple recipes like this one are great for students low on time and on a budget.
I adapted this recipe from Bon Appetit’s Bucatini with Butter-Roasted Tomato Sauce. I replaced a few of the more expensive ingredients with more accessible, easier kept items that make more sense for students to keep around in the house. The recipe should make about four servings and take about 40 minutes, but only 20 of those minutes are active! This is a great recipe to make while studying at home — just pop the sauce into the oven and you’ll have a great sauce in no time!
Shared by Hannah Walters-Vida (Features Reporter)
In an effort to describe how good this soup is, the most a room full of Sil writers could come up with is “warm, warm soup, it hugs you from the inside”. Pretty much everyone in the office will agree that this is a great recipe for soup. I typically double the recipe and freeze the soup in mason jars for when I need a quick, filling meal.
This recipe is originally by Jennifer Segal and I made a few modifications to make it vegan friendly. This recipe yields 8 servings and takes about 45 minutes to make, but most of the time is spent letting the soup simmer. This soup can stay fresh in the freezer for up to 3 months, so it’s worth the investment in time. Just make sure to pop it into the fridge the day before wanting to reheat it!
Shared by Razan Samara (Arts & Culture Editor)
This is my go-to recipe for dinner with friends and potlucks. It also makes for a perfect side dish alongside lunch or dinner, I personally think it pairs really well with chicken tawook tacos and panko-breaded fish. This recipe yields about 3-4 servings and was inspired by Cookie and Kate.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve found myself become quite reliant on this recipe. It requires minimal effort, which means I can throw a whole batch together pretty quickly the night before my early morning commutes. This recipe has filling ingredients, can easily travel and can be modified to meet your taste preferences. I encourage you to keep things new and interesting with every rendition of the dish!
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By: Justin Temple
Waiting for final grades to be posted is a terrible experience defined by an abundance of anxiety coupled with the constant refreshing of Mosaic. Usually, this biannual waiting game ends before the new year for fall term grades and before the beginning of May for winter term. At that point, the "grade anxiety" faced by so many students, myself included, has subdued.
This time around, however, I am still waiting on a final grade nearly two months after the course ended. A situation like this should never occur at McMaster University and needs to be addressed by mandating grade submission deadlines for course instructors.
Such a mandate is not without precedent. Carleton University requires that instructors submit their final grades within 10 calendar days of the course's final exam. The University of Western Ontario grants instructors even less time, requiring submission of final grades within a week of the final exam.
Besides Carleton and Western, the University of Regina, the University of Victoria, the University of Windsor and Ryerson University are other postsecondary institutions which have implemented grade submission deadlines for instructors. It is evidently not a new idea.
Despite this, McMaster currently has no policy that requires instructors to submit final grades by a specific deadline. This is beyond an inconvenience and only serves to complicate students’ lives.
For example, should an instructor fail to submit marks by the drop-and-add deadline for a prerequisite course, students' registration in a secondary course may be thrown into limbo.
Simultaneously, students planning on taking a second course based on their performance in the prerequisite class are withheld critical information that would likely dictate their decision to take the second course or not.
Even more alarming, a long delay in the submission of final grades can create a negative impact for students eyeing graduate studies. Given that grades are required to be reported to an applicant's desired graduate school as early as late December, an instructor sitting on their hands can put prospective graduate students in a completely unnecessary pinch.
With so much riding on those applications, McMaster is doing a disservice to its students by failing to force accountability onto its faculty.
Moreover, McMaster’s mission to promote health and wellness amongst its students could be furthered by mandating a grade submission deadline. As the time between when a student finishes a course and subsequently receives their final grade is variable and can last for weeks in length, existing academic anxiety is worsened.
A mark deadline could quell some of the existing anxiety by limiting the amount of time students spend worrying about marks they have yet to receive. Additionally, a grading deadline would provide students with a much more concrete timeframe to expect their marks, limiting any anxiety derived from the uncertainty of when grades will be uploaded.
As students, we should not have to deal with the mental and bureaucratic turmoil created from the inability of instructors to submit our marks promptly. Such issues could easily be averted by requiring instructors to provide their final marks by a specified date. Besides, as instructors demand us to submit our assignments on time, is it not time that they get a taste of their own medicine?
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By: Brent Urbanski
University testing is the Neapolitan ice cream of student evaluation. With its two midterm tests and single exam, this format has become known to students as an imperfect trifecta. As this format continues to be observed by students across classes, it becomes clear that university testing needs to change.
Within McMaster University, infrequent heavily-weighted tests have become the standard. Their proponents argue that they offer a pragmatic solution to the demands brought on by an increasing student population.
This seems reasonable considering approximately 26,780 undergraduate students attend McMaster.
Yet, despite a relatively large student body, as many as 62 per cent of undergraduate courses have less than 60 students registered. Of the remaining third, another nine per cent is accounted for by first-year, faculty-core courses, where non-standard assessment methods have already been adopted. Thus, only 29 per cent of McMaster courses have rationale on the grounds of large class sizes for the current evaluative structure.
While the limited time that our professors possess is valuable and should be allocated appropriately, students pay an underreported opportunity cost that is similar in consequence. As students, university is intended to be a time to quench curiosity and inspire potential. This opportunity is contingent on our instructors’ abilities to teach.
With the recent push by the McMaster Students Union to eliminate evaluations weighted 50 per cent or greater, it seems that a new horizon is bound. However, while removing grade-defining exams will function to ease student anxiety and diversify grade distribution, it does little to correct an inherently flawed system of learning.
Cognitive psychologists have known for decades that proper learning involves the deep and repeated consideration of material. The more you practice retrieval of information, the better your long-term memory will become.
Distributed learning involves learning material over time while interleaved learning involves practicing several units of content in rotation. Science states that adoption of these two learning techniques leads to resilient memory when combined with levels of deep practice such as testing.
For a full-time student, with roughly 62 days of content from five courses compressed into three testing instances per course, the present assessment scheme hardly encourages distributed learning.
Given the current structure, it is not difficult to understand why students cram for major evaluations. It has been shown clearly that cramming behaviour produces improved short-term results when compared to the long-term strategies of distributed and interleaved learning.
While long-term strategies promote lasting memories, a majority of students are hesitant over using them. The current grading structure is unforgiving, and students frequently resort to suboptimal learning techniques given the cost of failure. But as the goal of classes is to foster long-term retention of material, the university should diminish the value of cramming and reward optimal strategies.
To craft an ideal course, one must first break the association between testing and evaluation. After decades of experimentation, testing has been established as the strongest way to induce resilient learning; the average person, however, views constant studying as preferable.
What we need is more testing in university courses. Not only does this greatly improve student performance on final examinations, but also a majority of students claim that they prefer frequent, low-stakes testing in comparison to infrequent, high-stakes testing.
And even better, testing does not only reference closed-book, sit-down evaluations. The evidence for open-book testing, textbook homework, and take-home assignments is overwhelming. Any content that provides students an opportunity to elaborate on their knowledge in a distributed manner will produce worthwhile results.
At this point, there is no question that frequent testing improves learning, as we have seen with the recent success of blended learning. The major challenge lies within the feasibility of adoption. Will instructors and teaching staff take on the extra effort to provide their students with a framework for success? Only future transcripts will tell.
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Exam season is now upon us and it’s time to form a strategy to tackle December. The most important part of that strategy is finding a way to take care of yourself during this month of studying. Be sure to take some breaks between your study sessions. Take our quiz to get some suggestions on how to spend these precious breaks.
[wp_quiz id="36279"]
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McMaster students may see changes in the Health Sciences Library study space and operational hours as soon as this year. Student Representative Assembly health sciences representatives Devin Roshan and Tushar Tejpal are working closely with HSL director Jennifer McKinnell to redistribute Sunday hours to Saturday and replace bookshelves with more cubicles and desks.
The initiative is part of the SRA health sciences year-plan and aims to address concerns about limited study space and hours in HSL.
“When I was elected, I had a lot of conversations with students who were saying that it was very difficult to find cubicles, particularly during midterms and exams,” Roshan said.
Roshan and Tejpal have been meeting regularly with McKinnell over the summer and into the school year. While short-term changes were difficult to implement, the plans for a summer 2019 renovation have recently been approved.
The renovations will involve removing some bookshelves downstairs and replacing them with cubicles or desks. In addition, new study rooms may be constructed under the main stairway, and some computers may be removed in favour of desk space. The project is not related to the current closure of the reading pavilion room downstairs.
Limited library hours have long been a concern of students and a priority of the SRA reps. In the past, SRA representatives have been able to successfully lobby for extended hours as the exam period approaches. For example, thanks to student advocacy, Thode library now stays open until 3 a.m. during the second half of the semester.
The health sciences representatives have been working to implement longer hours dating back to the 2016-2017 year. However, extending HSL past the typical 10:45 p.m. closing time is not possible, largely because the library is located in the same building as the Hamilton Health Sciences Centre, which has jurisdiction over the closing time of the library.
[spacer height="20px"]“In the past, representatives have advocated for extended hours, like in Thode, but that is actually not possible due to security reasons,” Roshan said.
This year’s representatives have taken a different approach, looking to redistribute hours rather than simply extending them.
“My plan is essentially to look at what hours are not being utilized and how we can better use those hours for students,” Roshan said.
Specifically, Roshan and Tujpal are advocating for a redistribution of two or three hours from Sunday to Saturday, so the library will open later on Sundays, but stay open longer on Saturdays. Right now, the library closes at 5:45 p.m. on Saturdays, and opens at 10 a.m. on Sundays.
According to the health sciences representatives, statistics show that there are relatively few students coming into HSL on Sunday mornings.
This plan is also more feasible than previous ones in terms of staff costs, which have been another factor that complicates extending hours.
“It is essentially a more cost-effective plan for us. Instead of asking for more funding, we are just redistributing hours so that we’re still at a balance for the cost,” Roshan said.
The next steps for the health sciences caucus for the extended Saturday hours project is to organize a health sciences faculty petition to get support for redistributing hours.
“Once we get a compiled list of over 80 to 100 individuals, we are going to present that information to Jennifer McKinnell and from there, she can go above to her superiors and present that and then hopefully that will lead to change,” Roshan said.
The renovations to the library are planned to begin in the summer of 2019 and finish before the fall. Roshan and Tejpal are optimistic that a pilot project for extended Saturday hours will begin this year.
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With midterms either resuming or beginning for most students and final exams lingering around the corner, scheduling your time is becoming more of a challenge.
As reading week has now come to an end and the regret of not being as productive as your professors expected you to be when they assigned their due dates has set in, it would be nice to have a more convenient way to organize your workload.
An exam schedule for midterm exams, like the one that is currently available on Mosaic for finals, could help reduce the stress that already exists for students while they try to prioritize their to-do lists.
It would also help students plan ahead of time for the reading week and allocate their time according to the importance of assignment weights.
Presently, students rely on course syllabi on Avenue to Learn for midterm exam dates. However, this is not always productive, as sometimes instructors do not decide the midterm date in advance for certain courses and students are forced to readjust their schedules as a result.
This results in either lack of proper preparation for exams or student having to pull all-nighters to complete work from other courses with less effort than they would have if they had the time to finish assignments wholeheartedly.
With midterms either resuming or beginning for most students and final exams lingering around the corner, scheduling your time is becoming more of a challenge.
However, a posted exam schedule would not only help students, but also instructors to mentally prepare for their schedule and organize their time accordingly.
This means that students would not only be able to better organize their to-do lists, but also their leisure time.
As reading week proves every time it comes around, students need a breather whether we anticipate it or not. Though we plan to complete assignments, catch up on readings and study for upcoming exams every reading week, it is usually the case that we don’t get to doing so until the weekend before the break is over anyway.
With busy schedules, students are sometimes too busy to fit in time for relaxation and we may find ourselves procrastinating in times we really shouldn’t be.
This may be the product of lack of organization or merely poor coordination between professors in planning due dates, which is a conspiracy that students joke about often.
If there was a way to make planning easier and more productive between instructors and students, this might be a good start.
In addition to making orgaization and time management more manageable, having a midterm exam schedule available at the beginning of the semester on Mosaic would also allow for international student and commuters to better plan for trips to visit home without worrying about the possibility of missing something in their time away from school.
An exam schedule for midterms on Mosaic would help increase organization, productivity and time management for students, especially around times that are meant for a compromise between studying and relaxing such as reading week.
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It’s the end of November; assignments are due, finals are imminent, I’m writing a graduate school admissions test in two weeks and the scones I have in the oven are almost ready to come out. The timer finishes and rings. I scramble to the kitchen, pull the tray out and leave it to cool. Back to studying.
I grew up cooking and baking with my mother. At first, I mostly just stirred in (and ate) chocolate chips. But as I got older, I got to take a more involved role in the process, and my appreciation for my mom’s cookies, stews and cakes grew. Practically everything she touched turned out deliciously, which was impressive in its own right. But so was her time management, especially around family dinners and holidays. She kept meticulous lists of what had been prepared and what was still left to do. The pre-Christmas baking was busy, sure, but my mom was never stressed.
When I started university, I aspired to that. I wanted to be able to fend for myself as a real adult. Residence, of course, is not a place to develop those skills, and throughout my first year I felt hamstrung; I had limited control over my lifestyle. Cooking facilities were limited at best, and there was nowhere to safely store any groceries other than a milk carton and a few apples. The same was true in second year. Though I shared a house with a group of people I loved and got along with, the kitchen barely had enough counter space for one person to be cooking, let alone six.
There’s a peace that comes with entering the kitchen with a new recipe in my hand because I know that for the next 20, 30, 60 minutes, I can work undisturbed.
In third year I finally started to feel some freedom in this regard. My new apartment had actual counter space. I could easily keep track of my spice cupboard and baking essentials and I actually had room to store them all. At last, I had found a home in which I could really explore cooking and baking on my own, and honestly, it’s been the only activity I find consistently relieves stress.
I know this isn’t necessarily the most agreed-upon way to relax, but hear me out. There is something incredibly soothing about rote tasks; chopping vegetables, hand-mixing batter or measuring flour that puts me at ease. I can take out my frustration with a particular problem by mincing shallots as small as I possibly can, or release tension after a deadline by shaping and cutting dough into scones.
Ultimately, it’s (usually) rewarding. I get to eat something that I made, which comes with a particular kind of pride. Often I’ll have to learn a new technique, experiment or improvise based on what I have in my kitchen. I also have to factor in that my appliances aren’t exactly state of the art. Learning new skills or adapting them based on the space and equipment at my disposal is a kind of skill I can’t pick up doing anything else, and even if my cookies don’t look as pretty as those photographed in my cookbook, they still taste pretty great.
Experimenting with cooking has also improved my relationship with food simply because I have so much control over what I eat. As someone who hasn’t always had the healthiest of perspective with what and how I eat, cooking and baking what I want, when I want has alleviated much of my anxiety about food.
Preparing a meal or dessert is one of the few activities where I take time for myself. I’m not checking my phone, replying to emails or planning how to divide the rest of my time for doing schoolwork. In that moment, I’m just focusing on adding the right amount of flour, making sure the eggshells don’t get in the batter or ensuring that my chicken is fully cooked. There’s a peace that comes with entering the kitchen with a new recipe in my hand because I know that for the next 20, 30, 60 minutes, I can work undisturbed.
As I careen further into Real Adulthood, baking in particular becomes something of a social activity. Even within our Silhouette Slack group, we have a channel for sharing recipes, and there have been multiple discussions of potlucks or family dinner style get-togethers.
Cooking allows me to use skills I don’t get to improve on in the classroom. Being able to shape your thoughts into an essay or understand a complicated concept is rewarding, but if I had to list my accomplishments this term, baking bread on my own, in my ancient oven, for the first time would be near the top of my list.
Making a nice dinner or a fancy dessert may not erase my deadlines or get my essays written faster, but it clears my head and calms me in a way nothing else does. The smell wafting from the kitchen when the timer goes off is just a bonus.
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Though testing in Canadian Martyrs Catholic Elementary School seems like a suitable option to make up for the lack of examination space at McMaster, in practice, it isn’t.
On Dec. 15 of last year, McMaster Daily News announced that some students would begin writing exams in Canadian Martyrs.
As soon as this new examination space was opened, I was fortunate enough to have a total of three exams take place in this location.
Based on my personal experience with doing an exam in Canadian Martyrs, it is not the best place to compensate for the lack of exam space on campus.
Given that exams are so heavily weighted and our GPAs are so dependent on how well we perform in them, standards for better examining accommodations should be met.
In my first exam experience at Canadian Martyrs, I was very disappointed with the accommodation that I thought would be a temporary one.
First, I had no idea where what the school was located and that sparked a sense of anxiety on its own.
Once I found the location, I was waiting amongst over 100 other students in a staircase, while other students were stuck outside in winter weather at 7 p.m. on a Friday night. And that’s just the beginning.
Once we all finally filed into the exam room on the second floor of the building, our exam began and I found myself unable to focus and distracted by the sound of children screaming in what sounded like a gym on the other side of the makeshift wall.
The sound of children was so loud, that the professor instructed the invigilators to go find ear plugs for us in to wear for the remaining hour and a half of our exam.
After remaining patient and optimistic to the solution that was presented, I was disappointed once again when the invigilators did not have enough ear plugs to distribute to all the students and had only managed to cover one quarter of the class.
In my first examining experience at Canadian Martyrs, I was very disappointed with the accommodation that I thought would be a temporary one.
Of course, I was one of the unlucky students who did not have earplugs to block out the sound of screaming children.
In an English history of literature class where the exam was composed of passage responses and an essay, focus was essential.
Needless to say, I left the exam very upset, and as a commuter with an hour and a half commute to endure after an exam on a Friday night, I was not impressed. In addition, my grade definitely suffered from my exam grade.
The idea of partnering with a facility near campus may have seemed like an efficient idea to make up for the lack of space for examination, but in practice, has not played out as well as one would hope.
Not only was I already stress out about my exam and upset with the time that my exam was being held, but my grade evidently suffered from the experience so my stress did not end with that expereince.
Hopefully this arrangement will be one that is not definite but temporary. For students who have their exams in Canadian Martyrs this winter, I hope your experience will not be as unfortunate as mine.
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By: Owen Angus-Yamada
Exams are one of the most stressful times for students because so much of a class rides on the result of one test. Students are constantly told that performances on these tests are crucial to getting accepted to graduate school or getting hired at a prestigious, high paying workplace. While good grades often lead to success, high marks shouldn’t necessarily be the highest priority for students. When did we start going to school to perform well instead of to learn?
Now, before you say, “Performing well on a test reflects your knowledge of a subject, idiot,” ask yourself how much you remember from last semester’s classes. For the majority of people, I can almost guarantee that all those carefully crafted notes and hours of practice problems have lead to little or no long term retention. We can’t remember because we were too focused on our grade outcomes. We study for what’s going to be tested, not to develop our understanding of the subject.
Some of us even go out of our way to take “bird courses” that will result in an easy A to add to our transcript. We forget that we’re here to learn about what we want to spend our lives doing.
Much of McMaster’s priority, unfortunately, seems to be on this short-term performance rather than on ways to encourage long-term retention. While extending the library hours during exam periods is nice and the fall reading week helps to break the material up a bit, these don’t add enough to remembering the course material once you’re done.
When it comes to aiding students with depression, anxiety and stress brought on by exams and marks, McMaster offers support in the forms of counselling and even visits from friendly therapy dogs, but these are short-term solutions that mask the larger issue.
They do not deal with the issue that these negative emotions are brought on university’s heavy emphasis on performance culture rather than being a learning environment.
When stress and anxiety kick in this exam season, you should take a look in the mirror and ask how important performing well on these exams actually is. Not everything rides on a single outcome.
There also seems to be hesitancy to use the beneficial parts of some classes in more traditional courses. Solutions like placing less emphasis on exams and shifting the weight to more constant assessments, exploring blended learning a bit more and reducing lectures in favour of different types of learning are all possible in most courses.
I am also a believer in the effectiveness of pass or fail classes. It takes the ideas of marks completely out of the picture to redirect students’ focus on content understanding and retention. These might be difficult and require more effort from professors, but should be better for students’ learning, development and long-term performance.
With these suggestions and how your courses may currently be, the end-goal of learning should always be the primary objective with your grades being secondary. However, this involves not only increasing long-term retention, but not worrying too much about short-term results.
Learning and development happens only after countless failed attempts so we shouldn’t be afraid to fail. Failure should be the goal in every classroom. Instead of bell curving tests and handing out bonus marks, professors should push every student outside their intellectual comfort zone in the hopes they fail.
If you truly enjoy doing something, it doesn’t matter if you fail as long as you improve. If you’re not passionate about what you’re studying, your goal should still be constant improvement.
When stress and anxiety kick in this exam season, you should take a look in the mirror and ask how important performing well on these exams actually is. Not everything rides on a single outcome.
Try your best, but don’t be afraid to fail as long as you continue to learn from the experience. Marks do not define you.
McMaster is nearing the end of its 2016-2017 school year. Graduation is looming for many, exams are on the horizon and the excitement for summer has warmed up with the weather. While students are looking towards the post-exam season, we unfortunately, still have a month left of groaning about how final exams aren’t an accurate measure of our knowledge.
Here is a list of 11 things you can do to prepare emotionally and physically for your exams.
Featured Image c/o Jazmin Quaynor // StockSnap.io
