The Proposed Common Hour Exam Change
I believe that the proposed common hour exam change to one per night has some logistical issues. Wednesday night classes such as McBride would be interrupted by these exams. What happens when someone has class and an exam scheduled at the same time? This includes the late night EPICS classes that are offered to freshman. Also, many organizations make their meetings on either Monday or Wednesday nights in order to avoid conflict with Common Hour exams.
I think that most of the problems with having two exams on the same night could be resolved with a better awareness of scheduling. For example, scheduling a Statics and Calc III exam on the same night is going to create a lot of conflict. In the flow chart these classes are meant to be taken simultaneously.
Personally, I have hardly ever had to take 2 exams on the same night, and although it wasn't fun, the same thing happens during finals. I think the change would create more problems with scheduling than it would fix.
With regard to the athletes, if the common hour time is changed, then the coaches will just keep their athletes for the total time of their practice instead of letting them out early and they will still only have the same amount of time to get ready for their exams.
UPDATE: First, all of these complaints were brought up in detail at several of our USG meetings. We are trying to make the exams at 7:30 so that the evening classes wouldn’t be very interrupted. The exception would be the 6pm to 9pm classes. Overall, it was decided that the benefit of moving exams to four nights a week outweighed the costs. There was a committee formed with students, faculty, and staff to move forward with the proposed common hour exam change. They voted in favor of the change. We will be sure to communicate the progress to the student body, so please comment on our page if you have any suggestions in the future!
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Thanks for the response! We are glad to see that people are reading our email! During the next USG meeting we will bring up these concerns to the council. Feel free to attend if you would like! The meeting is on Thursday at 6pm in Petroleum Hall.