Final Exam Schedule Encroaches Upon Student's Holiday Festivities

Any student who has been through final exams at Fordham is aware of the stressful buildup to this week. An air of anxiety settles over the campus, and the library overflows with students eager to teach themselves what they have missed over the past semester. Added to the pressure of completing finals is the promise of Christmas (or summer) vacation, which lies just beyond their reach. With students longing to be with family and friends, devoting complete and proper attention to finals becomes an even more difficult task, yet the current final exams schedule fails to account for these realities, and it should be amended to reflect them.

 

Under the current final exams schedule for the fall 2009 semester, classes terminate on Dec. 10. Following this day, Dec. 11 to the 14 are designated as reading days intended for student preparation for exams. Lastly, finals are given from Dec. 15 to the 22. As any member of Fordham’s intelligent population can deduce, this means that the semester ends a mere three days before Christmas.

 

I have yet to encounter a member of the Fordham community who does not find this absurd. Beyond the trivial fact that this schedule leaves little time for Christmas shopping and party planning, it also forces students to arrange travel plans at very inconvenient, busy and expensive times. Combined with the fact that no student desires to be stuck on campus this close to the holidays, this stress may negatively impact performance on final exams. To me, these examples are more than adequate reason to change the final exam procedure. 

 

A change like this would most likely require the elimination of reading days, and for this reason many are opposed to a possible reevaluation of the schedule. Many students believe that reading days are essential to prepare adequately for final exams since they allow for two weekdays (and often one weekend) to be completely devoted to studying. In theory, four extra days of studying is a positive idea. In practice, however, I believe that reading days negatively impact students and the learning process. 

 

Reading days validate the belief that it is acceptable to cram one semester of learning into a short period of time. While students may benefit from this approach when grades are the only thing being examined, it is doubtful whether they will retain information for any lengthy period of time. By eliminating reading days, Fordham will no longer enable these tendencies. Instead, the lack of reading days would encourage studying throughout the semester, which is more effective for long-term learning. Also, eliminating reading days would force students to take responsibility for studying. They would need to manage their own time as opposed to using the time that the University freely gives them, and I believe this is an important skill to develop.

 

Furthermore, it can be argued that reading days don’t even serve the purpose for which they were created. Many students taking foreign language courses at the introductory and intermediate levels are not afforded their reading days because these exams are often given during one of them, yet this has never been a largely debated issue, so perhaps going immediately from classes to exams is not as detrimental as some would assume.

 

If these assertions were deemed valid, then we could eliminate reading days in favor of starting exams on the Dec. 11, and the semester would end a full four days before it is currently scheduled to finish, but we can go further.

 

Ideally, we should eliminate reading days, then it would be a valid option to hold final exams on the last day of class. Although this may create problems with some students having more than one or two finals per day, it could be fixed by adopting a schedule similar to final exams week in which only certain classes can hold their final exams on certain days. While some may argue that this procedure would be too similar to midterms week and that finals should be handled differently, I would say that the difference I have experienced between midterms and finals has not been so pronounced in my Fordham career thus far. Many professors value midterms and finals comparably, and even when they are weighted differently they remain within a few percentage points. Though this is not the case with all classes, this is where time management comes back into play: devote more time to the more heavily weighted exams. 

 

Although adopting these changes would drastically alter the final exams procedure, I believe we should at least debate their merit. With so many students unhappy about the date to which final exams runs, it would benefit the community at large to find some solutions or alternatives. 

 

Christina Barreiro, FCRH ’12, is an undeclared major from White Plains, N.Y. She can be reached at barreiro@fordham.edu.