Procrastination and nocturnal marathons during midterm week

Alas, here we are at one of the toughest weeks of the semester, when students catch up on reading and prepare study guides. Frist is somehow lively yet muted with the larger number of irate, exhausted students. Campus walkways and dining halls become quieter. It is at this halfway point we find out how well we are at testing our physical limits by engaging with textbooks with little to no sleep and experimenting with caffeinated beverages and sponging back the knowledge we forgot to absorb a few weeks ago. A midterm reading period sounds good around now, giving us a breather of a few days to prepare for midterms.

The real question I ask, though, is how much knowledge do we really get a chance to absorb? Our professors are great at teaching and most of the lectures are - maybe - riveting, but one of our academic problems is that our semester is shorter than most other colleges'. Our schedule is 12 weeks long, while most other schools under the semester schedule receive 15 weeks of instruction per semester, not including finals. With reading period and finals, we barely total 15.

I read the transcript of a speech given by a professor here who had to give up three weeks of instruction when he transferred from MIT. Would he take out three weeks of material, or teach 25 percent faster? We pay roughly the same amount in tuition to attend any of these top-tier schools, why should we be learning any less? The quality or quantity of our education should not be cut.

Should we really consider adding a study period before midterms week as proposed in several of the ultimately doomed proposals for reforming our academic calendar? I think it's absurd. One friend a couple of years ago described midterms week as a sleeping contest, where those who could function easily with just four hours of sleep a night during midterms would win out against the "weak" that could greatly benefit from a reading period. Most colleges and universities, however, don't have such a study period for midterms, let alone a finals reading period (or dead week, as some call it) that lasts a week and a half. This sleeping contest, or this "natural selection," happens at every college already. Such a period in our schedule would just eat into our summer or winter breaks. In the real world, our deadlines at work aren't preceded by reading periods but rather nocturnal marathons.

Halfway through reading and exams period every semester I've found myself saying, "Thank God we get three weeks to finish all this shit." Yet I still believe that Princeton's academic calendar is very inefficient. We essentially get seven weeks of no class from the end of instruction in the fall semester until the first day of class of spring semester. When I explain my schedule to my friends back home, reactions rage from "wtf" to "WTF," since all they get is a dainty three-day study period before finals.

Some may argue that Princeton's schedule is optimized; it gives us a chance to fully understand our course material, and a midterm reading period would complement that. But from another point of view, this is just a good way of boosting our grades. We've spread out our papers and tests over the course of three weeks (plus another three weeks for fall semester if you count winter break). With only 12 weeks of instruction, we're not learning as much anyway, and we've got much less to study.

The ratio of study/exam time to class time at this university (three weeks: 12 weeks) is much greater than other places (typically about 1.5 to two weeks: 15 weeks). We attend what's ranked by an independent magazine as the best university in the nation, but that doesn't let us conclude that we're also the university with the toughest classes. Arguably, if we decrease this ratio so that we have more weeks for lecture, we wouldn't need a grade deflation policy. Grades would probably decline across the board, removing any reason of requiring the policy, and people would earn what they deserve.

If we drastically shorten reading period down to three days, students and some professors would probably riot, since reading period has become a tradition taken for granted here.  What's a more viable solution? Yale has a reading period that lasts one week and an exam period that lasts one week, with fall semester ending before winter break. Harvard seems to be following suit: It has had a schedule very similar to Princeton's, but it is considering shortening the length of reading period and ending the fall semester before their winter break.

Parkinson's Law dictates that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. No matter how much time you give people, they're going to keep working until the end anyway. Princeton students are nothing if not masters of procrastination, B.S. and last-minute work. If we shorten reading period, we'll each work our way around it. We pay a hefty fee to go here, so we should be getting as much education out of the calendar as mentally possible. In the meantime, good luck with midterms.

 

Ben Chen is a mechanical and aerospace engineering major from Los Altos, Calif. He can be reached at bc@princeton.edu.