As classes wrap up and the semester draws to a close, students are beginning to prepare for finals. This year, the academic calendar includes one study day between the last day of classes and the first day of examinations, a number that this board finds to be insufficient for students. Moving forward, the registrar should take students' schedules and workloads better into consideration when determining the academic calendar.

While it is not unheard of to have just one study day before finals commence, the fact that classes end on a Monday this year combined with the shortened amount of preparation time for exams imposes difficulties on students who find their finals schedules front-loaded. Without an additional weekend to prepare for exams, it drastically reduces the amount of time that students have to write papers and study. Last fall, classes also ended on a Monday, but there were two days between that Monday and the first day of finals. While a difference of one day may not seem significant, it can have a dramatic effect on the pressure students are under toward the end of the semester. According to the PULSE survey recently taken by the Student Union, only 20 percent of students are satisfied with having one study day; 58 percent would be willing to add time to the academic calendar if it meant adding more study days.

Ideally, though, classes would end closer to the end of the week in order to build more study time into the schedule by adding a weekend between classes and finals. While it could be argued that having a class on Monday will not be significant for students who want to begin preparing for their exams earlier, in reality, this is not the case. Some professors who do not schedule final exams as part of their course—and even some who do—often assign final projects, papers and presentations for the last days of classes, making it unrealistic to expect students to use the time before finals to prepare for exams when they have other work to do during that time.

Whether it means adding a couple of days to the beginning of the year or taking away the last Monday of classes in order to give students more adequate time to prepare, the University should take care to alleviate pressure on already overworked students by adding more study days in the schedule. For students who have multiple exams on Wednesday and Thursday of finals week, the quick turnaround makes pulling all-nighters and cramming for exams almost mandatory. While some students may be able to begin their work earlier in anticipation of their early exams, others do not have that luxury; demanding class schedules and the culmination of club activities take up significant amounts of time at the end of the year.

As it stands, the finals schedule adds additional pressure to an already stressful time of the year. While it is true that elongating the academic year is an unattractive proposition, adding an extra day or two to the study period can make a big difference to students who are under a great deal of duress to succeed academically while still maintaining their commitments to extracurricular activities, and we hope that the University considers students' needs when making future schedules.