It all started in third grade; when we had to take this crazy new test, called the SOL, in several different subjects. As far as my memory serves, we did a little review before we took the tests, but it was never that big a deal.

Though it didn’t just stop there, we would continue to review every single year for the entirety of elementary school, and then when we entered middle school, everyone was stressing even more about the SOL’s, and the idea of possibly failing entered our heads. Though the biggest change was in the review: not only were we covering past lessons in class, now we were assigned twenty question online Jefferson labs to do every week had to be printed out with your name and score on it, and served as a few homework grades.

Now in the ninth grade, we have j-labs as long as forty questions due every week sometimes multiple times a week, and can be a significant as a quiz for each one. Along with learning new lessons, reviewing old ones and adding on normal tests, quizzes, and homework, forgetting even one assignment can be catastrophic to your grade.

Last weekend, instead of hanging out with my friends, going to a movie, or getting a little extra sleep, I was stressing out over a J-Lab that was due at twelve P.M. on Sunday, and considering it was the beginning of the quarter, it could make or break my grade. Not to mention the fact that we were told about it at the end of class on Friday giving me as little time as possible to accomplish the deed while juggling sports and other activities.

The worst is when the teacher adds regular paper homework on top, so after finishing the thirty or so questions assigned for homework, we then have to spend an hour and a half at least with J labs working on material that we covered six months ago. So even if you do it once, if you want to even think about getting a respectable grade it will take at least one more attempt.

Though the J-lab questions aren’t updated every year, so each question can be as recent as the year  2000, with some of the questions really making you wonder the chances a question like it will show up on the actual SOL of this generation.