Editorials
 
Longer Reading Period Needed

Spring has arrived once again on Oberlin’s fair fields, the semester is more than half gone and there is a sense of jubilation in the air. Students and professors alike look to the endless blue skies and shining sun and see the future ahead; they see May the carefree air of Commencement week and beyond. No more classes, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks!
But there is a problem, a dark cloud looming on the horizon: finals. This bane of both faculty and students begins to loom closer and closer following Spring Break –– reading period begins in exactly one month, May 13. A Sunday. And then ends on May 15, a Tuesday. For the hell of it, let’s say Saturday is also an okay day to study; that gives Oberlin students a total of four days after classes end –– two of them weekend days –– to review a semester’s worth of work in all classes and to write final papers. Four days for a semester. This seems, well, a little ridiculous. No, more than a little –– it’s just awful. 
Where to begin? The lack of time for preparation forces many students to begin cramming for finals while classes are still in session, thus leading them to neglect the last weeks’ work in the very classes for which they’re cramming. The time crunch forces professors to constantly deal with frantic students while trying to grade the glut of semester-end work and prepare to deal with the finals themselves. It slows down the network, makes the library smell bad and gets everyone really grumpy.
Now, of course, finals will always do all of these things. But they don’t need to do so quite so much. The reasoning behind the scheduling is simple enough; the College likes to have Commencement on Memorial Day, and we come back from Winter Term later than most colleges. So in order to get in 12 weeks, there needs to be less time between when classes end and when exams begin, so that the College can bring in alumni and parents of graduating seniors to butter up for donations with a week of drunken revelry. That’s fine, let ’em do that, everyone has fun. But the current exam schedule is a major disservice to current students –– who are the reason the College needs to butter up those alumni in the first place. 
The answer is a simple one, and has been offered before: self-scheduled exams. There is no logical argument against this solution; we have an honor code, so theoretically we shouldn’t worry about cheating anyway. Sure, it might be an administrative pain in the ass, but this College wouldn’t exist without its students. An office hassle should not stand in the way of students’ being able to fully express the depth and breadth of a semester’s learning.

Sodexho Gone: Good

The College Housing and Dining Committee announced the finalists for next year’s Campus Dining Service contract, and Sodexho-Marriot was not one of them. This is, if nothing else, a savvy move by the College. Whatever the actual rationale –– actual cost considerations, political pressure or whatever else –– the College gets brownie points with activists, something that is not all that common. There are, in fact, two letters in this week’s Review from members of anti-Marriot activist groups congratulating the College on its choice, and pushing for further anti-Marriot and pro-local/organic action. The groups make good points, ones that the College should not fail to notice. In reviewing bids and awarding the new CDS contract, the College should make sure that the provider is attentive to student dietary concerns, and also that any new dining scheme makes it far easier for upperclassmen to get off board.
However, this good PR is not a get-out-of-jail free card for the College administration. It shows that there is an increased level of attention to student concerns –– in this situation. It makes student groups feel good, and with the good weather and mounting workload that the approach of finals promises, perhaps many will rest on their laurels and tune out campus politics for the rest of the year; they should not. 
Perhaps a fear that the College will in these low-key months (including the summer) try to sneak across reforms or policies that might be unpopular could be seen as paranoid, perhaps not. In any event, if activists are to retain whatever political capital these and other victories have granted them, they cannot afford to go to sleep at the wheel or even put on cruise control. Nor can the College afford to ignore or not seek student opinion just because they have done so in this case. This is a good first step for administration and activists alike; may it continue as such. 

Editorials are the responsibility of the Review editorial board –– the Editor in Chief, Managing Editor and Perspectives Editor –– and do not necessarily reflect the view of the staff of the Review.