​Rethink reading period, midterm exams

In a week’s time, hordes of sleep-deprived students will be camped out in Perkins, adding to the ever-growing piles of empty coffee cups and plastic food containers from Vondy. As the fall semester comes to a close, many students find themselves scrambling to recover after a stressful last week of classes to review for an immediately looming finals week. Every semester and particularly in the fall, the transition between the last week of classes and the first exam day raises concerns and complaints about the length of our reading period.

Currently, fall semester’s reading period consists of this weekend and the Monday of finals week. This testing period follows a last week of classes that often includes presentations and last midterms. While an argument can be made for encouraging work in advance of finals, most students find that two sustained, back-to-back weeks of projects and exams compound their stress and detract from their learning. Even for students with light last weeks, three days is hardly enough time to quietly and dedicatedly review and cement everything learned in the semester.

Not too far from the stress of finals and self-scheduling during reading period is the perennial concern of how midterms are scheduled over the course of the semester. As each of us quickly realized in our first semester, midterms are rarely in the middle of the term and are anywhere from the fourth week of class to the last week of class. Duke is not the only elite university to decline to standardize the administration of midterms, with the University of Pennsylvania following a similarly open academic schedule. However, Princeton’s calendar features one, single week in the middle of the semester dedicated to the semester’s only midterm exams followed by a proper weeklong fall recess from classes. Further, Princeton, Harvard and Yale all offer reading periods of about a week before their final exam periods.

Besides relieving student stress and enabling more deliberate studying, a longer reading period would allow professors to feel confident setting comprehensive finals. Final exams could be set to better reflect a semester-long exploration of material instead of being a dense rush of studying. The irregular midterm scheduling also risks doubly penalizing students who struggle with later course material. Late midterm exams and papers often do not come back with feedback soon enough for students to respond and correct before final exams that, in turn, sometimes place more weight on later material. An easy solution to this is for professors to include a feedback return timeline in course syllabi to ensure timely suggestions for improvement.

We recommend extending reading period, especially in the fall, in light of student concerns. For the inevitably rolling schedule of midterms we also endure, we recommend that academic leadership consider designating two or three weeks in the semester as the only “midterm eligible” weeks such that midterms have to fall in those weeks. Professors would still have the freedom to determine if they want one or more frequent midterm papers or exams, but students would be able to go through exam periods relatively together and with such consistency that they are not spread thin juggling their classes as midterms draw their attention away in other classes. This would also powerfully open opportunities to schedule community events. From student productions to University-planned events, dependably knowing that students would be free of midterms after a midterm-eligible week would boost attendance and interest in events.

While students will always be setting up temporary homes in Perkins in the semester’s last weeks, we find a number of ways to improve reading period, finals and the semester’s scheduling of midterm exams and papers.