Middle school covers 6th, 7th, and 8th grade in the U.S. educational system. Unlike in China, elementary school children in the U.S. do not have to test into a middle school. Unless the child is going to attend a private school (in that case testing is required), students who live in one general area usually attend the same middle school nearby.In most states in America, however, middle school students are required to undergo approximately 3 days of testing at the end of every year to see if they can pass a state administered examination. These exams usually test children in the areas of math, English, social studies and science; the tests rank the student and his/her respective school alongside all other students and schools in the state －contrary to as in China, however, a student』s personal test results are not released to the public. Generally, the material covered in these exams is very broad and the student is not expected to study extensively for the exams.
Middle school is valued as an important transitional stage between elementary school (「the easy life」) and high school (「the very, very busy life」). In middle school, students attend as many as eight or ten different classes of approximately 40 minutes each. They no longer have a single homeroom teacher or set of peers whom they study with for the duration of the day. Instead, middle-school students go to different classrooms, study with different students, and learn from different teachers for each subject. The amount of homework, projects, and tests the students have to prepare for increase with every passing year.
In middle school, students begin to get involved in extra-curricular activities outside of school, such as yearbook, sports teams, community service clubs, chess club, foreign language clubs, theater, etc. While middle school students are considerably busier in comparison to elementary schoolers, they usually still don』t carry a heavy burden of stress since their grades and extra-curricular activities aren』t officially recorded.