With dead week approaching, students are beginning to spend their time preparing for final exams, taking place between Dec. 11 and 19. Some students who have three consecutive exams a day may feel even more stressed than others, having to cram nine hours of exams in a 24-hour period.
However, policy does not require students to take three consecutively scheduled exams in a 24-hour period.
If students find they have three exams scheduled consecutively, they should report it directly to the department of Registration and Records before their exams, according to Louis Hunt, University registrar.
Hunt said taking nine hours’ worth of exams in a 24-hour period “would be stressful” for students, and that usually there isn’t a problem getting exams rescheduled.
“We try to schedule the exams so that they won’t conflict, but with common exams it is inevitable,” Hunt said.
According to Hunt, once students report their situation to Registration and Records they will have their schedules verified. Then they receive a form approving their request to change the date of a specific exam, as designated by the student.
That form should be taken to the specified instructor or departmental office to arrange for a new exam date.
Hunt said once that date is determined, the instructor should sign the form and the student is responsible for returning the form to the Department of Registration and Records.
According to Hunt, there are a number of reasons why students should reschedule an exam that is consecutively scheduled with two others.
“One might just be fatigue,” Hunt said. “To give [students] a little break, there is time built in between exams for a recovery period, so to speak.”
Hunt said this year fewer than 100 students have had to reschedule exams.
Some professors are offering their exams on more than one day to help alleviate exam day conflicts.
Mark Molner, a freshman in engineering, said his psychology professor, Bartholomew Craig, is offering the exam to students on Dec. 8 when the original date was Dec. 19.
“Students were requesting an additional exam date on his Web site,” Molner said. “[Craig] told us we had the option to take it during dead week or on Dec. 19. I think a lot of students will go [Dec. 8] because a lot of people want to avoid the stress at the very end of the exam week.”
Molly Robinson, a freshman in business management, said her psychology professor, James Kalat, is also making exceptions for people who are having schedule conflicts with his exam scheduled for Dec. 18.
“He is allowing students to talk to him about making new arrangements to work something out,” Robinson said.
Kathy Ziga, an adviser in First Year College, is providing two additional dates for her students to take the exam. To avoid having students run into schedule conflicts and stress on the scheduled exam date of Dec. 18, she said she arranged the optional dates to be Dec. 12 or 14.