Final exams that last two hours blocks are hard enough without having to take them at 7:30 a.m. However, there seems to be no other solution to scheduling finals into a five day period than having early morning finals and late night finals.
Some students don’t understand why their finals week differs so much from that of their normal week.
“I have my hardest final at 7:30 Friday morning when normally my class is at 11:00 Mondays and Wednesdays,”said Mason Demist, sophomore geology major.
Demist said his schedule is all over the place and nothing seems to correlate.
“The final exam schedule is created by the Academic and Classroom Scheduling unit of the Registrar’s Office,” said Julia Murphy, assistant registrar.
The guidelines are based off the Faculty Council policy, historical business practices and the University’s current final exam policy which can be found under the Advising and Registration section of the catalog.
These guidelines for semester credits taken at CSU include a final exam period that’s scheduled the last week of each semester. Each class meets for two hours and finals are scheduled on a rotation basis in order to not favor any class over another.
Courses worth more than four credits meet for two final blocks.
According to Murphy, they rotate exam times fall semester to spring semester.
“We rotate exam periods each semester to try and ensure a specific class time is not always assigned either an early morning or late evening exam period,” Murphy said.
When considering the rotating schedule and the fact the schedulers must fit many two hour blocks into a five day period it makes sense to have a very ‘all over the place’ schedule.
“There is no policy or guidance that final exam periods should fall around when you would normally have class,” Murphy said.
According to Rachel Neville, a CSU math professor, students have always been opposed to how finals play out but there really is not perfect solution in trying to manage so many classes, give them longer amounts of time and accommodate everyone.
According to Murphy the most heavily scheduled time for finals week is 10 a.m., due to the fact this is when the most courses are going on on campus during a regular week of classes.
When students final schedules have three or more final exams in one day, or happen to have conflicts of one overlapping with another final, students have the option to negotiate a different time to take the final with the given professor according to the Final Exam Policies found on the Registrar’s website.
“I don’t think we have it the worse though, Boulder has finals on Saturday,” Neville said.
Collegian Reporter Josephine Bush can be reached at news@collegian.com.
