9:15 Is Just Too Early

All of this talk about innate differences has gotten me thinking. One of the most significant innate differences between Harvard students doesn’t have to do with their gender, but with another biological characteristic entirely. At Harvard, like everywhere else, there are morning people and there are late-night people.

We all know the differences. There are those students who can wake up at 7:00 in the morning, throw on a pair of shorts and flip-flops (year-round), enthusiastically scoop froot loops, er, fruity ohs into their mouths as they discourse on Kant. And there are those who sleep through their noon classes because they only got three hours of sleep and might still be shaking off the effects of an early-morning bad trip. You know, the Mass. Hall types who occasionally play a little classical music in the ayem versus those guys who lived across the hall from me freshman year who just started to get buzzed around 3:00 every morning. I know because I heard them.

So I overstate the characteristics of the two camps a little. As a late-night person who has never had a bad trip (and gets into prime Kant-discoursing mode at around 2:00 a.m.), I can say that we night owls study just as hard as the living dead who actually make it to the breakfast service in the dining hall on a daily basis. But the difference does exist, and why do we care? We care because every year around this time—and, I’m told, in May, too—we have to take final exams. And some of them are in the morning. For morning people, making a 9:15 a.m. exam refreshed after a solid eight hours of sleep is as easy as a Fairy Tales final. For the rest of us, stumbling into Science Center C at 9:15 in the morning is about as pleasant as being Prince Harry at a Holocaust memorial. You study for hours, yet all you can remember is that song you heard on the radio the day before. Maybe it was Ace of Base? Dates, facts, basic grammatical constructions, all sneak out of your brain like rats following the tune of the Pied Piper. Or was it the Three Little Pigs?

Now, I would wager that most Harvard students—many of whom actively avoid classes that start before 11:00 a.m. or meet regularly on Fridays—don’t remember, think or write as effectively in the morning as they do later on in the day. It’s not merely an inconvenience for late-nighters—as the squinty-eyed superiority complex of the early risers would undoubtedly claim. Morning people get a big advantage over the rest of us when it comes to final exams, which often determine student grades. There’s an innate difference that is being ignored, and it’s actively harming students’ academic performance.

What the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) should do is adjust its finals schedule to bring it up to date with the sleep and work habits of its students. And University Hall can do this in a way that doesn’t discriminate against either morning people or late-night people. It should adopt the Wellesley system of final examination in which students have a week-long period during which they can elect to take any final exam for any class within certain hours of the day. Wellesley students simply have to check in with a proctor at the library, pick up an exam and go into a quiet room to take their tests. The proctors time the students and keep track of the exam rooms. This way, students can choose their ideal time of day for testing.

There, are, obviously, big differences between Wellesley and Harvard. But these are not insurmountable. Instead of using Lamont for testing, why not set up the Science Center as a final exam zone, allowing students to pick up exams and test in shifts in the large lecture halls? And if FAS decides it doesn’t trust undergraduates not to divulge information about the contents of final exams to others yet to take them, why not set up a slightly more rigid system in which each exam is still scheduled for a certain day, but students can choose to take it in a morning or an afternoon shift? That would minimize the chance for cheating and build a lot more student choice into the system.

The bottom line is that students at the College should be able to choose what time of day to take an exam. It will require some administrative hassle, but student scholarship and, critically, their mental health during this cold and dark time of year would markedly improve.

Stephen W. Stromberg ’05, The Crimson’s editorial chair, is a Russian studies concentrator in Adams House.