It’s that time of year again. Students are spending a majority of their day sitting in front of a computer studying and/or finishing up group projects [or just starting them] for the week to come. As the professors put our minds to the test by coming up with final exams, we put our bodies to the test trying to study for them.

We push our bodies to the limit by eating late night meals, consuming obnoxious amounts of caffeine and sometimes going days with little to no sleep, so naturally, we look for energy alternatives. In many cases, students tend to rely on drugs to push them through it. This, however, can do more harm than good.

The drug of choice for many college students cramming for exams is adderall. Yes, the drug can make you more focused for a long amount of time and it can help you stay awake for long hours of the night, but you only get these “benefits” by misusing a prescription drug, which can have the opposite effect on your health.

Not everyone is affected by adderall in the same way. People who do not normally take the medication may have a reaction to it that may range anywhere from having slight upper abdominal pain all the way to dizziness or passing out.

Any time you take a prescription medication, the dosage should be monitored by a medical doctor. The average dose for a person 18-25 who has ADHD would be 2.5 to 6.0 milligrams daily, or about one to three pills a day.

College students are notorious for abusing the dosage of these pills. One in five college students admit to using adderall when they do not have a prescription for it.

For people who do not have ADHD taking adderall can feel more focused and can make activities that would normally seem boring — like reading 100 pages of a text book — seem effortless. Still, scientists have said that the side effects may backfire for students who are not in need of the drug.

Just like any other prescription drug, it is easy to become dependent on its “help.” If you take medication every time you study for a subject, it would be easy for you to become dependent on the drug for that subject. Studying or testing without the drug will seem strange. Being so young, we really should not have to be dependent on on any kind of drug to be able to do our homework.

The solution is simple, students need to utilize better time management skills. This way, we don’t have to stay up all night working on projects that we had half of the school year to do. Sleep and food are two major staples of our health and without them we will probably perform badly on our finals anyway. Being healthy and taking proper care of ourselves is important during dead week and is just as important as doing well on our actual finals.

Using a drug to enhance your performance on a test should be considered cheating. Just like athletes cannot take steroids to improve their performance on the field, we should not be able to take drugs to improve our grades in the classroom.

Buckle down, do the work and skip the drugs if you want to ensure good grades. Depending on what you choose to take, illicit and improperly used drugs could leave you unable to function without them.