It’s almost that time of year again. Important projects and long essays are beginning to pile up. By the time they’re due, only finals week is left. However, with assignments scheduled this way, students are forced to study for their final exams and to work on big projects simultaneously. This leads to both stress and weariness.
We The Threefold Advocate hope that John Brown University takes notice of this problem and implements a dead week policy in response. This would be a week of no newly assigned quizzes, tests, homework or extracurricular meetings and activities. This gives students a time to rest and prepare for their upcoming final exams.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? In order to give students the best chance at making a high grade on their final, often the most important test in a class, they have a week to study with minimal interruptions. As it is, our dead week is literally where a student may as well be dead. Hyped up on caffeine and sugar, they stay up late each and every night studying for their finals and hurrying to finish last minute assignments before deadlines.
Why give all this stress to students? Why do it when their most important grades are at stake? With the way things are, with too much work to do and too little time in the semester left, students are placed in a very compromising position. What they need is a little r-and-r.
Georgia Tech prohibits professors from giving exams, quizzes, lab practicums or lab reports during the week before finals if the class has a “traditional final exam.” However, professors can still teach new material and assign homework if written in the class syllabus given out at the beginning of a semester.
Likewise, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has a similar dead week policy. Professors can assign projects, papers, exams and presentations to be due the week before finals. However, it must be in the syllabus before the eighth week of class.
We would prefer a policy similar to the former, preventing students from having to worry about studying for something other than their final test during dead week. However, we support the flexibility given to professors in the latter.
We don’t want to step on anyone’s toes. Professors need to teach and students need to learn, but students also need to rest. For this reason, implementing a dead week policy is the best option for everyone.