Since I was in third grade, I’ve been told every school year that the next year would be much more difficult. Fifth grade was going to be much harder than fourth grade, because we would have more state exams. Eighth grade would be more challenging than seventh, because we’d have high school level courses. Junior year would be way worse than sophomore year because we’d be taking college entrance exams.

For the most part, I found these claims to be untrue. Every year of school felt like the natural next step. But the biggest transition—the one looming on the horizon for many years—was the one from high school to college. Why? We wouldn’t be coddled as much. We wouldn’t have in-class exam review sessions. We wouldn’t have extensive review sheets. We wouldn’t have practice tests.

For once, I found that my teachers were right—or at least partly right. Coming by extensive test preparatory materials isn’t as easy as it was in high school. For some courses at Washington University, there are practice exams dating back 10 years that students can access online. In others, there are only one or two old tests made available. Yet there are also professors who don’t provide any access to prior exams, leaving their students with no way of knowing what their exams will really be like.

Even in courses with several practice tests available online, I still get anxious. But my anxiety flies through the roof when I don’t know what to expect out of an exam. How will I know if I’ve studied the right amount or if my class notes and homework really prepared me for a test if I don’t even know what kind of questions my professor will ask? For all I know, my expectations could be completely wrong, my methods of studying completely invalid.

These anxieties could be easily combatted if I was able to familiarize myself with the test format beforehand. I’m not saying that professors have a duty to make our lives easy—tests should be challenging, and professors should definitely ask questions that require students to apply concepts in new and interesting ways. After all, the goal of college isn’t merely to be able to spit back facts; the goal is to become a better thinker and to expand your mind. Tests should not be difficult because students have never seen the types of questions being asked before or because the formatting of the exam is confusing.

Wash. U. professors aren’t out to make students’ lives as miserable as possible by giving unfair, ridiculously hard exams, but Wash. U. professors do understand that reusing exam questions is a time saver. There are some professors who do not provide previous tests to students because the same questions may appear on that semester’s exams.

As a student, I am constantly evolving my study strategies and refining my writing skills. I expect my professors’ teaching to evolve too. Part of that includes reworking test questions that students did poorly on and making sure that material on an exam adequately reflects what students learned in class. Creating new exams every semester is an important part of this process.

Students at Wash. U. are generally stressed over exams, and if professors have the chance to reduce this anxiety level by providing adequate test prep materials, they should take it. I’m not looking for the College Board archives of past exams that I had in high school, but a couple of practice tests could be helpful. After all, college is harder than high school, but when practice tests are made available, it just feels like a natural progression.