Before your exam, get a good night’s sleep. Review your notes. Eat a good dinner. In fact, eat a good breakfast the next morning, too. 

Have a cup of coffee if it won’t give you the jitters. If it will, maybe just settle for tea. 

Oh, and don’t forget to pop an Adderall.

BRETTSCHNEIDER

Jordan Stover’s column Wednesday, March 16 compared using Adderall on exams to using steroids in professional sports. 

All right, an Adderall can help my performance — but while steroids may help me put on massive amounts of muscle, Adderall will not give me a better brain.

I compliment Stover for making the comparison to a cup of coffee; it’s just the comparison I would have made. A coffee focuses your mind and energizes you. So does Adderall. The difference, she says, is the legality of either method.

Excuse me? I didn’t know that legality and fairness were so deeply entwined. Perhaps the lesson we ought to learn is that caffeine should be illegalized, except for prescription use -— or that Adderall should be freely available.

A test in college ought to be indicative of a college student’s abilities. That doesn’t mean rote memorization and the ability to spew out facts; nor ought it be an endurance competition, in which whichever student grips a pencil the longest — before passing out, his hand an unrecognizable arthritic claw — wins. 

What that means is that a proper exam tests your ability to think critically, and your ability to analyze and understand concepts. It tests your ability to apply them. In short: it tests your intellect.

 In general, a legitimate college course ought to look for something more than the ability to retain information from the textbook.

Math requires imaginative skill — and whatever formulas you hope the Adderall helps you memorize are usually laid right out on the exam. The social sciences depend on your analytical ability, not your ability to parrot facts. 

And buddy, if you think you can get anywhere in philosophy or literature by popping some pills, you got another think coming.

What, then, does Adderall do? Does it improve your critical thinking skills? Nope. Does it sharpen your ability to imaginatively understand concepts? No. Does it help you think through complicated intellectual loops? Sorry, man, you gotta pick another drug for that.

It focuses you. And it improves your recall ability. A confession: I’ve never used Adderall, or any other prescription psychiatric drug. I don’t feel, however, that my fellow students who do use it have any sort of unfair advantage on me. Yes, they may focus better. Yes, they may have better recall.

But at the end of the day, college is about your mind’s capabilities, not the occasional fluctuations of your brain chemistry.

—Phillip Brettschneider is a junior from Marietta majoring in anthropology