The holidays are just around the corner, and we students are more than ready for a few days away from our favourite institution of discovery. But there is a time of the year when extra days off are not necessarily welcome: namely, the extra study days before exams in May. It’s high time that the university rethink its policy on spring exam dates, because the current schedule hinders those who need to be out of school and into the workforce by the first of May.
Consider, for example, a student who plans to write his exams in April and begin working at an out of town job in early May-a job that will, of course, pay for his next year of study. At York, Western, McGill, Waterloo, in fact pretty much all other schools out there, this would be no problem, as exam schedules at these schools provide a clean break between the academic and labour-intensive sections of the year. U of T’s exam period, on the other hand, runs almost into the middle of May, meaning that a student could potentially write her last exam on May 12, killing any chance of relocating for work should the job require an early start date, as most four-month contracts do.
Proponents of the late finish-and there are obviously some in the registrar’s office-would argue that the week students get off between the end of classes and the start of exams provides the study time needed to succeed on the exams. But most every other school in the province gets by just fine with a day or two break between classes and exams; realistically, a fair amount of our week is generally spent in blissful procrastination. No one should deny students time to study for what are admittedly tough finals. But, a more flexible, creative schedule needs to be implemented-one that perhaps starts exams on a Wednesday so as to spread them out over an additional study weekend, one that does not jeopardize students’ chances at quality summer employment.
If the study week is such a necessity, then adjustments could be made to other parts of the calendar. Do we need six more vacation days after New Year’s than students at Laurier, McGill, or Waterloo? Perhaps we could start our year shortly after Labour Day, like Western and York do, and end within the month of April without missing significant class times.
With tuitions set to rise and students’ wallets about to be stretched as never before, our university must fulfill its mandate of putting students first by giving us the chance to be as competitive in the summer job market as we are in our classes. It does us and our bank accounts no good to be starting our exam period when some schools have already finished theirs.
