SUNY-ESF’s governing body calls for final exam policy to help students
SUNY-ESF’s academic governing body passed a resolution to create a final exam schedule policy at its Tuesday meeting.
The resolution, sponsored by Academic Governance’s Student Life Committee, calls for a policy determining how many final exams students can take in one day and how faculty should accommodate students requesting alternative final exam times.
Neal Abrams, chair of the Student Life Committee and a chemistry professor at SUNY-ESF, said the resolution came from the realization that no policy existed regarding final exams.
“A student can have anywhere from zero to an infinite number of exams in one day on our campus,” he said.
The committee also developed the resolution after considering that SUNY-ESF’s course schedule for the 2016-17 academic year was reset to minimize students’ scheduling conflicts and maximize the use of instructional spaces, according to a draft of the resolution.
The draft also said that SUNY-ESF’s final exam schedule is directly tied to Syracuse University’s final exam schedule, and some SUNY-ESF students may take SU classes that have conflicting final exam times. SUNY-ESF’s existing final exam schedule prevents faculty from spreading final exams equally over finals week.
Professors are generally willing to work with students who ask to reschedule their final exams if they can’t make it to the original times scheduled, Abrams said. There are some students, though, who feel as if they don’t have the right to make that request, he added.
The resolution calls for the right of students to have no more than two final exams scheduled in one day, Abrams said. Professors should also be responsible for working with their students and other faculty members to schedule alternative times to take conflicting exams, he added.
Although the resolution passed, some faculty members and students expressed concerns.
Lee Newman, an environmental and forest biology professor, said students shouldn’t have to take more than two exams in one day, but it’s hard for professors to accommodate multiple students who can’t take the exam at a single alternative time. When that happens, she has to make multiple versions of the same exam and block out more time from her schedule for each student with a schedule conflict, she said.
“When a faculty member is seen as approachable, we’re asked all the time to do this and that, which causes equitability issues in terms of having people make more accommodations than others,” said Kim Schulz, a biology professor.
Schulz suggested having a rule that determines which professors get asked for accommodations so that the same ones don’t continually have to create multiple exams.
James Quinn, president of SUNY-ESF’s Undergraduate Student Association, said the amendment would put a heavier burden on professors.
“I don’t think we should be limiting it,” he said. “It’s a conversation between the student and the professor. This seems like it would be creating a whole situation that would be so much harder for professors to control and manage.”
Other suggestions included making final exam schedules available to students before the academic year starts, having two time options for each exam as part of an alternative exam schedule and using the pre-exam reading day to schedule alternative test times.
Abrams said the committee did not want to micromanage certain aspects of the resolution because each case is different. He also said SUNY-ESF cannot enforce certain changes, such as releasing a determined final exam schedule and scheduling make-up exams on reading day due to policies outside the college and partnerships with other universities.
The Student Life Committee wants to help students who may not know they can reschedule their final exams because of a schedule conflict or back-to-back exams, he said. The committee hopes to have the resolution implemented for the spring 2019 semester.
