The Academic Affairs office recently released the fall 2015/spring 2016 academic calendar, surprising many students with an extra-late finals week and an elimination of any sort of reading period.

According to the calendar, fall 2015 classes will end on Tuesday, Dec. 15, and final exams will commence immediately afterward on Wednesday, Dec. 16. Finals week will go until Dec. 22, and residence halls will close on Dec. 23.

Donald Nieman, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Binghamton University, said that there are parameters to follow when making the schedule, and it is difficult to balance everything. These guidelines, set by the United States Department of Education, regulate credit hours, student class time and outside-of-class work.

He said the changes are largely a result of how the calendar falls — usually, finals occur the last week before Christmas, Monday to Friday. But in 2015, Christmas falls on a Friday, so the week is cut short. Because the University has to fulfill a certain number of days of classes, Nieman explained that finals week must run late to accommodate them.

“I didn’t want to push back the beginning of the semester, because if we’d done that, students would’ve been quitting their jobs and getting ready to come here,” Nieman said. “Cutting a week out of someone’s opportunity to earn money in the summer really affects a lot of students very adversely.”

Despite this, students and faculty alike say they are unhappy with how the end of the semester falls. Ann Merriwether, a psychology professor, said it will put pressure on everybody.

“I think it’s going to create a bit of stress for all of us,” Merriwether said. “It will be a challenge to get grades completed in a timely fashion, one would suspect it will make exam preparation more challenging.”

Since residence halls close early, resident assistants will be closing buildings until late Dec. 23. Nick Pulakos, a sophomore majoring in history and currently applying to be an RA, said he would be unhappy staying so long.

“I would be extremely annoyed that I would be getting home very late,” Pulakos said. “The holiday season as a whole is extremely stressful because not only are you dealing with family but finals are right then, and then I have to worry about getting home late and seeing my family, it’s adding another element of stress that doesn’t necessarily have to be there.”

A senior RA, who asked to be quoted anonymously, said that the new schedule’s lack of time for exam preparation will be detrimental to student success.

“I think it’s a huge disadvantage to all of the students not getting any time in between the last day of classes and the beginning of final exams,” he wrote in an email. “Usually you get at least the weekend, other schools get entire weeks.”

He also said that ending so close to Christmas would be risky for students remaining till the end of exam week who live far away.

“We have a five or six hour drive home, and you don’t know what the weather is going to be like either, plus it’s holiday season so everybody is going to be on the road that day and I think its just too close to the holidays for school to be ending,” he said.

Nieman said that he understands that it can be an inconvenience, but that it is largely unavoidable and could be worse for students.

“I think that it will give them less time at home before the holidays, and I think that that probably will be an inconvenience for some,” Nieman said. “But we’re not pushing it so close that people who celebrate Christmas can’t get home for Christmas.”