Harvard's Exam Schedule: Why We're Still Here

Students at Columbia University finished their exams three weeks ago.

Students at Yale University have also been done with exams for almost three weeks. And Brown University students finished their semester two weeks ago.

But some unlucky Harvard students are still pulling all-nighters and cramming for exams and won't be able to leave Cambridge until tommorrow.

In its calendar, as in so many aspects of day-to-day life, Harvard has clung to what administrators call a traditional path, with a fall semester starting late and exams after Christmas break, and a spring exam schedule that this year threatens to run into June.

Most Ivy League schools and some outside the exclusive cadre have switched to a new exam system, one that makes some frustrated Harvard students green with envy in late May.

But Harvard harbors no plans to change its system.

"There are constantly proposals for different calendars," says Margaret E. Law, registrar of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Students want to go home for Christmas without the worry of studying for exams, but they don't realize what that change would involve," she says.

In order to leave school when most other college students do, students would have to give up some holidays as well as the luxurious two-week reading period, according to Law. "Any change in the current system would condense the semesters and make things more difficult for the students," she says.

Harvard's system is unusual, but not unique. There are still some schools--Princeton and New York University (NYU) among them--that have not changed over to the now-customary exam schedule.

Academic calendars became the subject of heated controversy on many campuses in the late 1960s and 1970s because students and faculty had conflicting views on what the best exam system was, says Columbia University Registrar Zeita-Marion Lobley.

Students usually wanted longer vacation breaks, while faculty members wanted the conventional system because it was better aligned with early September research deadlines and professional meetings, Lobley says.

In recent years, often after much debate, many colleges have changed to the new system, in which the fall term begins right after Labor Day and ends with exams before Christmas.

Typically, students under the new system have almost a month of winter vacation. They return to class in late January or early February for a spring semester without a long reading period ending in early May.

Brown, Columbia, Cornell, and Yale are among the Ivies that have changed to the new system. Other colleges, such as Dartmouth and Stanford, have instituted unusual trimester or quarters systems very different from the traditional calendar.

Administrators at colleges that have switched their calendar often sav that students and faculty have expressed satisfaction with the move. Others, however, say the new system has engendered mixed feelings among students who have felt more stress in the condensed academic year.

Brown changed from the traditional system to the new one four years ago because of very strong student lobbying, says Katherine P. Hall, the university registrar.

"The students had been pushing for a new calendar for a very long time, almost 10 years," she says. "The university created several committees to study and discuss the issue, and finally it was agreed upon.

Brown students are happy to end exams before Christmas, but they are realizing that the new system means the end of semesters are very pressured, Hall says.

Faculty were reluctant to accept the new system because they thought it would infringe on their research time, she says. The new calendar requires many faculty to come back to the campus before Labor Day to prepare for classes, and the preparation often conflicts with important professional meetings in late August, Hall says.

Members of Brown's faculty say the free month in January is not enough time for them to conduct significant research, while the summer months important for research are now curtailed, according to Hall.

The Brown students, who were generally in favor of the change, are also finding fault with the new schedule, Hall says. She says it is difficult for students to return to Brown only a day after the Labor Day weekend, because it is hard for them to leave their summer jobs.

In addition, she said that students find that the month of January is a long time to be at home, and there are not many jobs available, so many students get bored with the vacation time.

"There is no perfect calendar. This one hasn't solved all the problems, but if given the option of the old calendar, students would stick with this one," Hall says.

Students at Columbia also have mixed feelings about their school's switch to the new system in 1974, Lobley says.

Under the traditional system, "it would get very expensive for students to go home [over Christmas], especially the international students, and we had a serious problem with students and faculty just not returning after the holidays," Lobley says.

With exams after Christmas, "there was a lot of make-up exams and incompletes, and enrollment definitely dropped after the vacation," she adds, explaining why many students prefer the new system. A poll taken two years ago indicated that people liked the calendar, Lobley says.

But an unfortunate consequence of the change was that reading period was cut short. "Students are constantly struggling for an extra day, but we just can't fit it in," Lobley says.

NYU, one of the few remaining institutions that still follows the traditional calendar, plans to change to the new schedule in two years, school officials say.

The university had considered the change for more than 10 years, and finally decided on it because "everyone was tired of the issue, and people are finally ready for it," says University Registrar Millicent A. Lecount.

She says that neither students nor faculty liked the "disjointed" fall term. "Students felt that it was unfair for them to go home and then come back, it was an imposition to go back and forth," Lecount says.

Everyone is generally optimistic that this new calendar will be better, she says. But she adds that starting in 1988-89 there will be no reading period and the Jewish holidays will no longer be official school holidays.

While NYU has planned to change its schedule, Harvard has seemed satisfied with a calendar that has changed remarkably little over the years.

With the exception of a temporary quarterly system to accommodate a fluid student body during World II, the University's only change in the last half-century has been, starting 10 years ago, to begin the academic year one week earlier to help students procure summer jobs.

"There are many assets to having exams after Christmas," Law says. "It gives students more time to prepare for exams, it gives them a breathing space. I think it would be awful to have to have exams earlier," she adds.

Whether students want to change Harvard's calendar is unclear, according to the results of a poll by the Undergraduate Council (UC) last year.

In the referendum the UC asked students under what conditions they would like to have exams before Christmas vacation. The questionnaire, which some students criticized as overly complicated, asked students whether they were willing to return to school earlier in the fall and perhaps sacrifice part of reading period or other holidays in order to start the summer earlier.

"The results were inconclusive," says Michael L. Goldenberg '88, a member of the Academic Committee that sponsored the referendum vote. The vote was 49 percent in favor of earlier exams, and 48 percent against earlier exams, from a pool of approximately 40 percent of the college, according to him.

"The results were positive in the philosophy favoring earlier exams, but in terms of the constraints of the schedule--such as sacrificing reading period, students were only marginally supportive," Goldenberg says.

There was strong support--70 percent to 30 percent--for starting the school year a week earlier in order to extend the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, but the University has no plans to change the semester, he says.

Goldenberg opposed Harvard's current calendar because "it makes Christmas a non-vacation, extending the stress period until January, when we have a whole month of hell ahead."

But former member of the council's Academic Committee Melissa S. Lane '88 says she preferred the traditional calendar because it gives students the "leisure of having time to think, write and reflect. It gives the semester a coherence."

Lane says that with another system the semester would be a "hectic and stressful time" in which students would find less time for extracurriculars.

Princeton is the only Ivy whose administrators have chosen to keep the same system that Harvard follows.

"With exams after Christimas, students have more of an opportunity to finish their assignments," says Princeton's Assistant Registrar Joseph L. Greenberg.

"If all the requirements were due before the holiday, there would be more incompletes, and the grades and the quality of the work definitely suffers," he says. There never has been very strong sentiment at Princeton for reshuffling the tried and true schedule.

"Our calendar now is functioning very well, if anything, a change would cause disruption to peoples lives," he says.