Exam Schedule

A good many Faculty members will lose sleep between the third and sixth of February. The third is the last day of the final examination period, and, according to a preliminary announcement handed to the Faculty last week, all "Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 9" courses will hold examinations on that last day. At least five of these courses are large ones, involving from 100 to 200 bluebooks, each crammed with essay answers.

By the sixth of February these essay answers must be pondered, the wheat sifted from the chaff, and the grades deposited at University Hall. This schedule means a furious 72 hours for instructors and graders in the "Monday...at 9" courses. And it may mean that bluebooks will of necessity receive a little less care and solicitude than they deserve and normally receive.

The problem created by the 72 rush hours might be handled by scheduling only elementary language and military science exams--which don't call for many essay questions and are thus graded more rapidly--on that last day of exams. But this would kill the system of rotating tests, a system which keeps students from having the same schedule two terms in a row and keeps instructors from enduring the same schedule several years in a row.

Without scrapping the rotating schedules, there remain two ways to case the burden on instructors teaching the courses involved. First, University Hall might advance the deadline for grades in those courses which meet toward the end of the exam period. If this would make it too tough for the Administrative Board to examine the grades of students going on or coming off probation, there is another possibility: The inter-term recess might be lengthened. This would allow instructors more time to deal fully with the bluebooks, and it would give students the satisfaction of knowing that a term's work was not being glossed over by hurried graders.