By Madison Dymond ’16

With exams coming up, there is one thing that is vital to ensure students’ success: motivation. It is the thing they need the most and the thing they can never seem to get. The brain capacity of a student means nothing if they are not motivated to learn and study the material.

Exams are memory tests. Memorizing and remembering takes effort, effort takes energy and energy stems from motivation. Therefore, if students are unmotivated, whether it be in the class or during the exam itself, they cannot reach their full potential.

This occurs because by the time teens reach high school, they generally have little to no intrinsic motivation. Humans are all born with a natural curiosity. They want to learn, especially at a young age. Somewhere along the journey through grade school, however, this love for learning is lost. Students then learn for grades or the multitude of extrinsic motivators schools provide.

Somehow, students must channel the curiosity they had as children and realize that one can’t go through life merely using outside factors to motivate themselves.