Exams, Housing Day Conflict

With midterm season in full force, Lamont Library Café worker Sharon S. Song ’12 says business is booming.

“You can definitely tell that there is a greater rush during midterm season,” she says.

At a certain point every semester, the atmosphere on campus noticeably shifts as midterm season leads into Housing Day and the subsequent Spring Break.

Already, science students have tackled exams in Life Sciences 1b and Physical Sciences 1, while the introductory course Ec 10, one of the largest undergraduate classes, held its first midterm of the semester on Wednesday.

For many students, the surge in workload can be tough to handle.

“I have to go to practice, come home from practice exhausted, and then take a math midterm at 7:00,” says lightweight rower Andrew J. Campbell ’14. “What sort of cruel person would do this to me?”

For some particularly unlucky students, exams will conflict with one of the most festive days of the year.

With Housing Day—when freshmen are sorted into their respective Houses—approaching next Thursday, their celebrations may have to wait.

The exams will fall amidst the chaos of House pride across campus, and for some, will follow an evening of partying the night before.

Some of the most popular courses are holding exams that date, including the introductory Psychology course, Science of Living Systems 20, taught by Professor Stephen A. Pinker, and the large sociology class Sociology 43: “Social Interaction.”

In order to accommodate for housing day and the demands currently on thesis writers, other classes—such as Ethical Reasoning 24: “Bioethics”—have moved their midterms from Housing Day to after the Spring Break.

But other students face similarly unfortunate scheduling.

“I’ve had Ec 10 yesterday, have Math 1b tonight, and an essay due Friday,” says Fritzi Reuter ’14. “So I’ve not really had a chance to properly think about each one.”

“The hard part was probably balancing my entire schedule,” says Gorick Ng ’14. “Not so much the work itself, but the fact that there was so much going on.”

But for some of those more seasoned Harvard students, midterms have become routine.

After three and a half years, James C. Winter ’11 says he is unfazed by his three midterms in one week.

“As a senior, it’s standard operating procedure. Everyone has one or two weeks in which they have multiple midterms to study for,” he says. “So at this point it’s just business as usual.”