It is late September, and the sticky, brutal heat has swiftly shifted into frigid gloom and early sunsets. We’ve traded skirts for sweatpants, sandals for sneakers. Umbrellas are necessary accessories for the unpredictable torrents of rain. Shoes are ruined in sidewalk puddles (will Yale ever do something about the drainage?). Such are the markings of the beginning of the school year.

Then, all of a sudden, just as classes are starting, your professor announces the date of the midterm: Thursday, Sept. 28.

That should be fine. There seems to be such a distance between now and the 28th. The loopy, symmetrical, foreign eight — a far-off number that seems it will never come. Only now it’s the 20th, and then the 21st, and you realize you only have two more classes between now and the midterm.

What have we even learned?

The first day of classes was Aug. 30, and the semester ends Dec. 20. Oxford Languages defines “mid” to mean “of or in the middle part or position of a range.” Shouldn’t midterms be in late October? Technically speaking, on Oct. 25, the day exactly between the semester’s start and end dates?

The passage of time is unsettling here. One moment your Monday alarm is blaring at you at 8:47 a.m. (you pressed snooze the first time), and the next, you’re munching on a chicken cutlet at Gheav at 2:00 am on Saturday, giggling about the side characters and failed situationships you saw and avoided tonight. Where did the week go?

Yale is always alive and buzzing with activity — so many energetic, passionate people in one place. Time to breathe is sacred and elusive. Thus, Sept. 21st turns to Sept. 28 in a blur of late-night Bass study spells, miscellaneous club meetings and ramen-and-gossip sessions with your suitemates.

Time flies, but not fast enough for it to really be halfway through the semester already. It has only been about a month since your parents left you with some cash, hugs and a perfectly made bed (the last time your bed was actually made). That wasn’t half a semester ago … yet.

So wouldn’t a more fitting name be quarter-terms?

Perhaps upperclassmen are used to the demands of Yale academics, but the load falls especially hard on new students.

“Especially for first years, midterm exams are scheduled far too early, and fail to give students a chance to fully settle into their lives as college students, let alone adjust to the academics,” said Alvin Lu ’27.

Most classes have multiple midterms, perhaps two midterms and a final. For example, my microeconomics class (yes, the class that you might as well assume every first year is enrolled in until proven otherwise) has its first “mid”-term Oct. 2, its second one Nov. 6, and a final Dec. 16.

Perhaps this is all a matter of lexicon, and the problem can simply be solved with more fitting language. After all, the term itself carries an anxiety-inducing weight. Maybe, if these assessments were titled more casually (“exam” or “test” would suffice), some of the unease would be alleviated.

As it stands, the prematurity of midterms is stark and unwelcome.

Andy Cheng ’27 was up into the morning hours scrawling equations the Saturday before his ENAS 151 midterm.

“Honestly they just came so suddenly because it was like … a month in, it was already midterms. I was shocked, befuddled and horrified,” he said.

Maybe you find early midterms helpful to consolidate the knowledge you’ve learned so far. Maybe you’re a proponent of the coinage of “quarter-terms.” Maybe it’s just not that deep. But what is irrefutable is that in terms of “mid,” at least according to the Oxford Languages Dictionary, midterms are not.