USG Academics Committee to administer survey for academic calendar changes

The Academics Committee of the University Student Government is currently designing a survey to assess opinions on potential changes to the current academic calendar, according to former Academics Committee Chair Ramie Fathy ’16.

The survey will be administered in early March to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as University faculty. According to Fathy, the survey will be sent via email through Qualtrics and administered by the Office of Institutional Research. The Academics Committee will then help to analyze the results.

Shannon Osaka ’17, Academics Committee Chair, said that the survey will focus on three aspects of the calendar: the timing of final exams in the winter, the length of Intersession and the length of the semester.

"The main question on which a lot of the calendar changes hinge is, do you want finals before winter break? The second question about Intersession is dependent on that question, and the third question about semester length is not dependent,” she explained.

As far as how long will it take to instate the changes, Deputy Dean of the College Elizabeth Colagiuri explained that committee members don't have an estimate of an exact time, but that there will need to be a fairly long lead time because academic calendars are set years in advance.

Colagiuri explained that once the Committee reaches the point of actually making recommendations of what a new calendar should look like, they will have to start working through the Faculty Committee on Classrooms and Schedule and the General Education Task Force before it is passed to a full-faculty vote.

Osaka said that members of the Academics Committee are working with the Office of the Dean of the College, and through this collaboration they decided to frame the survey as a collection of trade-off questions.

Jonathan Balkind, a third-year graduate student working on the Committee, explained that the purpose of the survey is to inform the faculty about what different members of the University would prefer in a calendar, since the faculty will ultimately make the decision.

“The idea is that we figure out the trade-offs, what's important to people, and then we can craft a calendar to put forward to the faculty,” he said, “Our input is shaping what gets put to the faculty and helping the administrators do that.”

Fathy explained that he has been wanting to work on a survey like this ever since he joined the Academics Committee but, because of other projects and the changes in the office of the Dean of the College, the Committee was not able to get started drafting a survey with administrators until this fall.

“It comes up as an impediment to student mental health: the lack of an opportunity to really take a break over the winter holiday period, with finals and end-of-term work hanging over everyone's head when they come back,” Colagiuri added.

Fathy said that the most important aspect of the project is figuring out what people want in the calendar. “If they don't want any changes at all, that's something we'll be arguing for. It all depends on the results of the survey,” he said.

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Osaka explained that if there is no change to the length of the twelve-week teaching period, there would be no change to length of reading period and finals, but the University would begin two weeks earlier, roughly during the last week of August. Then, classes would end right before Thanksgiving, and after break students would come back to a reading and finals period that is the same length as it is now, just moved to before winter break. Then there would be three-week-long winter break, plus one week of Intersession when students can either come back to campus or stay home. The spring semester would begin around the last week of January

She added that the other Intersession option would be to have this same situation, but with two weeks for Intersession, not one.

Osaka said that if the survey indicates that people do not want finals to be moved, there are still some changes that could possibly be made to the calendar – including the option of a 13-week teaching period as opposed to the current 12-week teaching period.

If the calendar were to adjust to a 13-week teaching period, Osaka explained that the calendar would gain one week of class and lose one week of the three week finals period.

“We decided to ask a subsequent question which is like, do you support having a longer teaching period at the expense of a shorter reading and finals period, and if so, how would you want the reading and finals period to be ratio-ed out?” Osaka added.

She noted that this elongated teaching period also applies to the spring semester.

Fathy explained that the finals period could remain at its current length and reading period would be shortened, or reading period would remain at its current length and the finals period would be shorter.

“In that case, students might have to take two exams on the same day, and those are the sorts of things we want them to know ahead of time before they take the survey,” he said.

Colagiuri, who has worked closely with the Academic Committee through a faculty task force on strategic planning and general education, noted that the issue of the University’s academic calendar has continually come up as an impediment, for example to students seeking study abroad or internship opportunities outside the University.

Balkind said that it was important to include the graduate student population in the conversation.

“We put together questions around research, research travel, [teaching assistant] commitments and general exams, which are quite important,” Balkind said.

He added that the results of the survey will differ radically depending on where the graduate students are in their studies, whether they have taken their general exams and whether they have TA commitments.

Balkind noted that a calendar change would be potentially helpful for international students, which comprise almost41 percent of the graduate student population.

Balkind said he thought that the faculty might like a three-week-long winter break and a two-week Intersession, especially since the current week-long Intersession is often devoted entirely for grading.

“[The faculty] would have a really long time to be able to buckle down and focus on research for an extended period there and potentially go and do research travel, [and] get into work with their graduate students in ways that I think right now are lacking," Balkind explained.

Fathy said that the Committee has been in conversation with the faculty, who have expressed a variety of opinions about potential calendar changes. He noted that one of the concerns faculty have raised is about the quality of students’ independent work if the timing of exams were to change.

He said it could be argued that if the University moves finals before break, students would have less time for independent work, and their exams or essays could be of worse quality.

"But a lot of people counter that by saying that's the case we have in the spring, and the quality is the same, and in the fall we lose a lot of momentum because we have so many breaks,” he explained.

Balkind explained that he is hopeful that the Committee will be able to enact a change in the calendar, but that they must do the necessary work first to find options that are feasible.

"We don't want to go forward with a proposal that simply is a non-starter, so that's why we're starting with a survey,” Colagiuri added.

Fathy noted that he is expecting a higher response rate thanthe PDF survey, which was 40 percent of the student body, although 40 percent was still about ten times higher than the usual USG survey.