Registrar changes final exam schedule

Beginning this fall semester, students will feel the effects of the Registrar Office's newly implemented policies for self-scheduled exams. The Science Center will be the sole location for taking self-scheduled exams; Pendleton and Founders will cease to be exam centers. In addition to the morning 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and afternoon 1:30 to 4 p.m. test-taking time slots, an evening slot will be available from 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. throughout the duration of final examinations this semester. The same policy of collecting self-scheduled exams will apply, where students decide when to take their exams and no proctors are present in the room during the exam.

Barry Kane, Registrar and Assistant Dean of the College, explained the three objectives that governed the Registrar Office's new choices. He specified that these changes had been implemented "to maintain fully self-scheduled exams, to minimize faculty involvement and to continue to cut costs."

Students highly value self- scheduled exams, a unique institution to Wellesley and a few other liberal arts colleges. With an essentially customizable timetable, students can arrange their priorities and time around everything from extra study time to booking tickets home for the holidays.

"If students want to take everything early and go home, they can. If others want to pace themselves, they can too," Cyndhia Ramatchandirane '11 said. "When I first came to Wellesley and learned about this self-scheduled exams policy, I thought it was great!"

It also is a token of faith from the College to its students—and one that is not taken for granted.

"Self-scheduled exams make the Wellesley experience different from other colleges. It's a testament to the independence and reliability that Wellesley invests in its students," Teresa Le '11 said.

Kane explained that the overriding principle in this decision was to maintain self-scheduled exams. "Wellesley is often used as a model by other schools in terms of more flexible exam scheduling and I think it works from a student perspective," he said.

Kane cited a smaller burden on Wellesley faculty as another benefit of the new self-scheduled exam policies. Because the five total days self-scheduled exams are offered remains the same as previous years, and three test-taking slots are available per day instead of two, there are now a total of fifteen possible test-taking slots rather than ten.

"We have seen an increase, compared to last year, in terms of the number of faculty offering self-scheduled exams," Kane said. He speculates that faculty may have been tentative to offer self-scheduled exams last year, because they were asked to self-administer their final examinations when the Registrar's Office saw the most drastic cut due to economic crisis. Kane believes that to avoid the additional logistical headaches, faculty might have been inclined to just assign a scheduled exam. "It's a legitimate argument…if you think about the range of activities our faculty could be involved with, I'd much rather use them for that. This is work that can be done by other people," Kane said. Asking the faculty to act as direct exam proctors, he believes, isn't a good idea in terms of efficiency.

The Registrar also had to take into consideration the reduced financial resources, an issue affecting all administrative decisions of the College and not unique to its office.

"We're looking to keep expenses down in a period of very constrained resources," Kane said. Each exam time slot requires six proctors and each exam center requires its own set of proctors. With three exam centers – Green Hall, Pendleton and the Science Center – one exam slot requires at least 18 employees. One consolidated exam center in the Science Center requires only six proctors for one exam slot. Kane explained that the Science Center was chosen on the basis of its size and capacity. "With a space as large as the Science Center, we needed to spread out the exams to have enough room to make it work," Kane said.

Ramatchandirane approves of the new exam policies, saying she was originally confused that they were asking professors to proctor their own exams to cut costs. "[The new policy] works for both the school and the students," she said. "I'm so glad that this is finally one thing that I liked when first coming to Wellesley, that has, unlike many other policies, returned during my senior year."