With the three-year academic calendar for the 2009 to 2012 years updated to reflect the newly implemented Reading Days, a wide array of opinions has been expressed over whether the planned schedule is beneficial for students.
As it stands, Reading Days will take place during the Monday and Tuesday after classes end, thus pushing the last day of final exams back to Thursday. Currently, all final examinations end within the week and a half span that begins on Monday and ends on Tuesday of the following week.
“That wasn’t exactly what we proposed initially,” former Student Body President Bobby Mills said. “What we proposed initially was just to have them on Thursday and Friday. We were going to make up the days by having school start earlier rather than end later.”
Regardless, this will effectively increase the time students spend at State by two days.
“I’m not really in favor of this,” David Drosback, a senior in mechanical engineering, said. “I really just wanted the Reading Days to be during the end of dead week.”
Reading Days were approved by a unanimous vote by the University’s Calendar Advisory Committee on Feb. 5 and eventually approved by the Provost.
Zach Hester, a junior in aerospace engineering, believes that the committee made a poor choice when deciding to add on to the end of the academic year to substitute for the class time lost due to reading days.
“They really should take some off of dead week rather than adding on to the end of the year,” Hester said. “That would mean I would have more time to study without having exams pushing even further into my Christmas break.”
Even though Hester wants part of dead week to be replaced by Reading Days, he believes that as a whole the entire concept of dead week is flawed.
“We don’t really need to have projects and stuff due during dead week,” Hester said. “If we had Reading Days at the end of dead week, we could still easily turn projects in online or on days before if we had to.”
The proposal for reading days that would take place during dead week initially came out of a strong initiative from student government official and Academics Committee Chair Amber Joyner.
“I was a proponent when it was passed in the committee, and even how it is now I think students will benefit from it,” Mills said. “For this to be coming to fruition is great.”
Student Government was in support of ending class on Wednesday, rather than Friday of dead week, which would’ve given students a Thursday to Sunday break from classes and assignments before their final exams.
Student Senator Morgan Donnelley said labs were a reason why the calendar does not split dead week with three dead days and two reading days is because there needs to be a certain number of days for each lab, and splitting dead week would have violated that.
“There are pros and cons, but in the long run it will be beneficial academically for students, which is after all the reason why we’re here,” Mills said. “It’s going to help as far as preparation goes.”
During the campaign for Reading Days, Joyner and others collected more than 1,700 signatures on a petition of support.
“Being in favor of what the petition stood for to start with it I signed it,” Drosback said. “But looking back, if I had known what would’ve come out of that, I wouldn’t have signed it.”
Drosback also worries that being at State for an extra two days is a waste of energy and money for the University.
“It’s bad because we have to leave the dorms and cafeterias open for two extra days,” he said. “With this being the year of energy and all, we really should make the schedule in favor of energy conservation.”
