Students spend a lot of time complaining about final examinations and papers. No one eagerly anticipates cramming for tests or spending hours gawking at a computer screen. Some students will never be entirely contented, but there are several ways to improve the finals examination experience — not to make it easier, but to give students the chance to do the best that they can.
First, finals need to be scheduled during finals week. For too long, the “finals examination period” listed on the Binghamton University calendar held no actual significance. This year, BU implemented a policy that all final examinations must be administered during finals week, but we have already seen that it isn’t strictly enforced. Professors have ignored it, scheduling exams during the last week of classes.
If an exam is cumulative, students need extra time to master the material. It is unfair to give students that challenge during the last week of classes. This isn’t because students can’t handle it, but because students can’t engage meaningfully with the material. They must balance refining all the knowledge they have accumulated through 14 weeks of courses with completing additional tasks required during that last week. No one is reading the materials or participating in discussions when a test is looming. Major papers, too, should uniformly be due during finals week rather than in the last week of classes, so that students can meaningfully research their topics as opposed to writing a cursory essay. Some classes already do this, but for the most part, the current system endorses cramming, not learning.
Scheduling exams during the last weeks of classes leads even the most diligent students to skip classes. Not because they don’t want to be in those classes, but because students are put in a position in which they need to prioritize studying for a test over learning new material. When one has two or three classes a day and the last one is an exam, it’s easy to make the decision to skip the earlier classes to study. This wouldn’t be a problem if exams and classes weren’t in the same week.
In combination with a determinate finals week, a designated reading period will help to ensure that students have the time required to produce quality work. Deadlines are set at the beginning of the semester, but peak performance on three exams scheduled in three consecutive days is nearly impossible, especially if final assignments are due the preceding week. A reading period is common practice at universities across the country. Two days without scheduled classes — perhaps on the Thursday and Friday before finals week — would allow students to fully prepare.
If Binghamton wants to market itself as a premier university, it ought to act like it. Other universities grant students this additional time to study because they recognize the demands imposed by their high-caliber classes. BU is not an easy school, and students should not be expected to study on the fly. We aren’t asking for a break — we’re asking for more time to review the large amounts of information that we have gathered during the semester.