USD professors should ease stress on students during finals week
The week all college students dread is slowly making its approach — finals week. The week when the terms “stressed” and “overwhelmed” become the two most used words in their vocabulary.
Stress tends to consume students over the next few weeks, and not just because they’re worried for exams, but more so because they’re juggling an overload of work.
Many students end up coming face-to-face with four final projects, two papers and a monstrosity of tests, all at pretty much the same time.
People tell students not to procrastinate; we hear it time and time again from teachers and parents. However, when a student is in college, it gets kind of hard to accomplish everything in advance.
After all, I’d say students spend 90 percent of the semester working on previous work that was due and then have only 10 percent of the time left in the semester to accomplish more work that’s now required in usually all of their classes.
It can be a lot to handle, and that’s why having finals policies enforced at USD would benefit both the students and faculty.
For years, students at universities across the U.S. have been pushing for policies that ensure final projects and papers aren’t due the same time a student is required to take a final exam. Some have succeeded.
For example, the Georgia Institute of Technology has a comprehensive rulebook regarding finals week, referred to as, “reading week.” Their rulebook outlines provisions regarding “what and when professors can assign major assignments and administer tests and quizzes.”
Hitting closer to home, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln also chose to change their policy regarding finals week in 2005. All projects, papers, presentations and unit exams must meet deadlines that are a week prior to the final exam week. Thus, the students aren’t stressing to try and cram everything in at one time.
Having a better structure, one where deadlines for regulate projects and assignments aren’t due on the last day of final exams, would be more beneficial than many realize.
This is also something faculty can enforce by simply trying to change deadlines so they don’t fall around the same week as finals.
Doing so would even help themselves by providing them with much more time to review everything and get grades in on time. It would allow the faculty to have a more relaxing, stress-relieved finals week, in addition to the students themselves.
It would give more time for students to spend with their friends as they cherish the last week they have with them before everyone is home bound. It would especially allow time for those who are graduating and don’t know when they’ll be seeing their close friends again.
It would allow for a trip to Verm Beach, a chance for students to catch their breaths, that last lunch date at Café Brule and a movie night with best friends.
Professors implementing a better finals system would allow for a break— a much-needed and deserved one after students have been working all year. It would allow students to be more organized, to not procrastinate as much and to really prepare for that test that so greatly affects their future.
So while the words “stressed” and “overwhelmed” may always continue to accompany finals week, maybe they can be lessened if a finals policy were enacted at USD.
