As Exams Loom
Kenneth Casperson

Once again exam week rears its ugly head on LSSUs campus. Students will spend hours studying and preparing (and quite possibly freaking out) at the prospect of just how much these lovely little tests will affect their semester grades. Social life will collapse. Faces will vanish, retreating into holes where opened textbooks and nervous anxiety absorb all light. Rivers and lakes will come to a boil
Well, people will be studying anyways.
As the exams continue their inexorable forward march towards the consumption of lives and time, it is important to remember that exams are not black holes, no matter how many times certain newspaper articles may make subtle connections. After all, theres no singularity at the center of your test paper, is there? Certain professors, though, are certainly working on it. It is also important to remember that, unlike black holes, exams are a giant cosmic disaster zone that can be escaped from, with a little studying and a bit of levelheaded behavior.
Studying is, as always, the primary component in preparing for any test. No one is saying that studying is not a viable option here  in fact, it is your best option. Information from the beginning of the year is, simply put, hard to remember, and reading back over your notes and earlier textbook chapters will be beneficial to your survival  or passing grades, rather. Start with the material from earlier in the year. It is easier, builds confidence, and above all is what you have most likely forgotten since then. Work your way up through the semester the same way your professor did, but try and keep it chronological when you study  the professors present the material in a certain order because it works best in that order, and your studying should reflect that. It sticks better in your mind, and it makes for less jumbled thoughts. 
Eat and sleep. Studying does you no good if you are too malnourished and or sleep deprived to attempt any data recovery from your addled brain. Computers require power (and competence), the human brain requires food and sleep. Same general principle.
One of the other very important things to remember when exams are looming outside your door like a pack of wolves that have mysteriously gained the ability to smash your GPA into so many tiny fragments: goofing off. Sunday, December 17th should be reserved as an all-out goof-off day for all students. Having a day to not care will do wonders for steadying your nerves and calming you down. Play some sports, exercise (unless you are taking a fitness course in which case that would be studying, so dont), and just generally avoid work. Anyone who thinks this is bad advice is wrong. Stressing oneself to the exact minute the exams happen is not a good idea; it results in shaky hands and addled brains, and no one needs that while trying to recover from memory the exact syntax to use when trying to dynamically allocate memory to a linked list they are trying to form to build some sort of address book (EGNR 265, anyone?)
Be smart with how you prepare for your exams, and everything will be okay. Output of grades is directly related to input of actual useful effort  not frantic memorization of facts. Exams are just a small bump in the fabric of space, not a cataclysmic occurrence that will pull you in with the gravity of a thousand or so suns until you are compressed into a single point. 
Even though that would be sort of funny. 
