Reading Period Woes

Changing the calendar has been tricky. With the first academic year under the newly reformed calendar nearly halfway complete, students have begun to absorb its implications, and an unintended consequence of calendar change has emerged—namely, the end of the semester has become considerably more stressful for students than in previous years. Given that one often-cited goal of calendar reform was to reduce student stress, this is an issue that the administration ought to seriously address when fine-tuning the calendar for future years.

The foremost problem with this current calendar phase is simply that reading period has become truncated. Last year’s fall reading period, excluding winter break, was ten days long. By contrast, this year’s reading period is only one week long—a full three days shorter. For many, this adjustment resulted in a far more hectic Thanksgiving recess than in years past, as students faced returning from break with fast-approaching paper due dates and impending exams. In the past, this arrangement would not be such a problem (the spring semester has always transitioned from classes directly into reading and exam period), but because reading period has been shortened from ten days to seven days in both the fall and spring semesters, the term-end transition has become significantly more stressful.

One potential response to the stresses of a shorter reading period would be for professors to avoid assigning the heavy workloads at the end of the fall semester that would have been manageable under the old calendar, and instead opt to distribute the workload more evenly throughout the semester. Too many professors this fall maintained their old syllabi structures without considering the potential impact of calendar reform on end-of-term student workloads.

Of course, we recognize that larger academic assignments such as papers and projects will inevitably pile up at the end of the semester. Yet students suffer even more from a shorter reading period because professors are not allowed to assign paper deadlines during exam period. This means that all papers must be completed before the end of reading period, rather than having this work more spread out. In light of the condensed reading period, professors should be given the flexibility to set paper deadlines during exam period—a paper due during exam period is much preferable to a premature deadline.

Overall, we recognize that the new calendar has many benefits, not least the rescheduling of exams before winter recess. The implementation, however, has not been perfect, and specific flaws require sincere attention from the administration going forward.