Reading Period, Final Exams, and Other Jokes

Near the end of every semester, without fail, two topics rear their heads from out of the academic policy dust and beg to be considered by those in charge of educational plans and policies at Oberlin. The first is self-scheduled exams. The second is the travesty that has become reading period. As students scramble to complete an increasing amount of work with little or no remittance in class schedule and travel plans on the horizon, they once again turn to the Educational Plans and Policies Committee for help, hoping that their pleas will not fall on deaf ears.
The EPPC and General Faculty seem to be worried that the student body is doing too much work, as evidenced by their attempts to change the credit system. Either the number of credits needed to graduate will be lowered or the credits per class increased. This will allegedly accomplish three things: parity with similar colleges in terms of workload, more crucial sleep time for students and the ability to actually attend class and learn things. If EPPC really cared about these things, it would first make changes in exams and reading period.
In the case of the former, the school’s draconian policy of exam scheduling continues unabated. The system does protect us from four-hour exams and interminable take-homes, but at the cost of our schedules and our teachers’ schedules. A student may have one test on the 18th and another on the 21st, with nothing in between, yet be unable to reschedule the second exam. Assigned times are simply no longer feasible. Oberlin has an Honor Code. Under this Code, teachers cannot even be in the room while tests or quizzes are going on. This seems the ideal set-up for self-scheduled exams. Teachers aren’t even present for testing anyway. Wellesley, just to name one of the many other schools with an honor system, has self-scheduled exams. Self-scheduled exams are simply more convenient for teachers, students, parents, and that’s just about everybody that matters.
With regard to reading period, the whole school agrees it’s a problem. There was even a question about it on the latest Student Senate referendum. Whatever the student vote on the subject, it will probably be buried just as the overwhelmingly positive vote on co-ed rooms was. “Reading period” is not so much a period as a blip on our collective watches. Four days, including a weekend: a weekend when we wouldn’t be going to class anyway, so what a break that is. Teachers assign homework and reading literally up to the last day of classes, giving their students little time to work on long-term assignments or study for big, comprehensive exams. The students then neglect classes and day-to-day work to do the work they won’t have time to prepare during “reading period.” A more realistic reading period is absolutely essential. To go back to the comparative approach, Oberlin likes to refer to itself as one of the Baby Ivies in terms of rigor, and the Adult Ivies all have week-long reading periods. That does not include the weekend.
Oberlin is an institution of higher learning. Everything we do should be geared toward the goal of making it an environment in which everyone is free to do exactly that. Yes, lessening the workload may free up our time so that we can do the work for the classes we do have more conscientiously. But plenty of people are doing fine with five classes a semester. Meanwhile, some students sit around for three days waiting for a single exam, and countless more skip a whole week’s worth of classes (cost: $77 dollars a class meeting and countless educational opportunities) and do a negligible amount of reading in order to write a paper due at the end of reading period. In these areas, Oberlin is run more like an elementary school than a college.