Budget cuts and staff shortages have compelled the administration to overhaul the traditional examination system employed by the College.
At the end of the fall semester, student ID cards will not be checked, course section numbers will not need to be memorized, and there will be no registration cards to be filled. Faculty members will distribute and collect exams, and students will record their own start and finish times. These measures will allow the staff to work out scheduling conflicts instead of administering student exams.
Self-scheduled exams were first introduced to Wellesley in the 1970s by the late Dean Phyllis Fleming. “[The new method is] going back to the way it was when this originally started,” Acting Registrar Laura Bey said.
Chief Justice Lauren Van Schepen ’10 described it as, “showing we trust students” rather than telling students they are trusted under the Honor Code, while patrolling exam corridors and checking that students have circled appropriate exam room numbers.
“They go back to that moment of more student autonomy and independence in the 60s and 70s,” Dean John O’Keefe of Academic Advising and Support said.
The new exam format has come about for two reasons. First, budget cuts reduced the staff of the Registrar’s Office, which had taken on the major task of administering self-scheduled exams in the past.
“[To] put envelopes together, prepare classrooms, put up signs —it added up to all the hours of an employee working half-time through the entire year. For people in the Registrar’s Office, that’s all we’re doing that week. None of us are getting our actual jobs done,” Registrar Laura Bey said.
To transition to the reduced staff, three senior faculty members, Emily Buchholtz, Kathryn Lynch and Ann Velenchik, came through with four recommendations. One addressed final exams, suggesting to “increase faculty responsibility for…self-scheduled exams” and introduce “the option of faculty-proctored scheduled exams”, Buchholtz said.
According to Associate Dean Adele Wolfson, the administration made an appeal to faculty to consider giving a fixed exam, and this semester more faculty members chose to give a fixed exam than a self-scheduled exam, which has been the majority choice in the past. Although the choice of giving a fixed or self-scheduled exam continues to be each professor’s individual decision, Wolfson said more professors were either made aware of the “fixed exam” option and found it preferable, or chose what was perceived as the lighter administrative workload. Van Schepen cited possible administration-to-faculty miscommunication, which gave the impression that administration had taken away or restricted the option of self-scheduled exams.
That miscommunication has endured. When interviewed, Professor Thomas Hansen said, “I did not know that they were keeping self-scheduled exams.”
“During the first meeting of department chairs, this plan was announced and described in its outline form. We were asked to canvas our departments to find out whether there was faculty support for giving scheduled exams in our courses,” said Professor Thomas Hansen, head of the German department. This led to the assumption that self-scheduled exams were no longer an option. The idea that professors always had the choice to give a fixed or self-scheduled exam also had not been communicated.
“I was never aware that I had the option of giving a fixed exam. I’m shocked at my own ignorance. It never occurred to me to do so – I just considered it the norm here,” said Hansen, who has taught here since 1977.
Second of all, an ad hoc committee realized that “at most schools comparable to Wellesley, the Registrar’s Office is not responsible for administering exams – it’s considered an academic issue. Just like faculty administer their own midterms, they are responsible for administering finals,” said Van Schepen.
Following through with a shift of responsibility from the Registrar’s Office to departments and faculty was met with an impressive amount of faculty support, said Dean Wolfson and committee members. A complete solution had to require no additional cost, nor overburden any one group. Department administrative assistants, especially, already had more on their plate due to a reduced staff.
“The goal would be to spread the work around so it wouldn’t be totally disruptive,” said Dean O’Keefe, who is serving on the ad hoc committee with Bey, Van Schepen, and other students, faculty and staff, to work out the new system.
When informed of this, Hansen said, “I’d much rather proctor my own exam than hand out exams for other courses.”
According to Van Schepen, the committee has so far put an emphasis on student opinions. A question asked after every committee decision is, “What will the students think?”, right down to details such as what to put on exam stickers – will it make things easier or harder for the students? In each meeting, exam processes are streamlined item-by-item, with a majority of changes accounting for behind-the-scenes administrative details. All committee members stated that for students, the exams week experience will have changed little overall.
One student concern is the need to reserve plane tickets early, which is difficult when waiting on a larger majority of fixed exams to be scheduled. As of Sept. 30, times and dates for fixed-schedule exams this December have been set and made available to students. However, the early-notice constraint is one the committee has put on a list of questions still to be handled, which includes how many test centers to set up, how to evaluate student and faculty opinions after December’s trial run, and how best to distribute information on the final policy.
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