Finals have begun and it would seem like a good time to look at the old university calendar, so readily available on campus pipeline. (Which, I have often thought is really just a bunch of Atari Computers and some monkeys.) Now, the calendar holds many treasures for these next two weeks. Exams are scheduled at fun times, on fun days, and there are even wondrous gifts such as “Reading Days!”
Really, it’s all just more stress than we need right now.
The first, and most aggravating thing, is that exams are scheduled for this upcoming Saturday. Now, you would think that since classes meet Monday through Friday that our exams could fall in that time period. But no! That just can’t be. So instead of having a nice enjoyable Friday night, many of us have to hit the books hard and hit the sack early. (Tossing and turning in the night as legions of drunkards yell obscenities through the Quad.)
The second thing to take note of is the designation of “reading” days. Yesterday was one, and as the rhesus monkeys hand printed The Mirror, hopefully you got a chance to catch up with Aristotle or Locke or Maxim for that matter. The other reading day is this Sunday. How wonderful! The university has labeled Sunday as a day to read!
Just so the schedulers know, most of us would probably have read then anyway. Is it just a helpful nudge in the right direction such as, “Come on now Jimmy pick up that Economics text. Remember, it’s a reading day?” This is no favor to us. With exams on Saturday and “reading” on Sunday, what fun are we supposed to have this weekend?
The final thing about exam scheduling is that the earliest exam is 9:00 a.m. This is pretty early, but wait, that’s not my complaint. My real beef here is that all semester people trudge off at the God-forsaken time of 7:45 a.m. (or 7:00 a.m. if you live in Dolan) to make 8:00 a.m. classes. Why is it that 9:00 a.m. is the earliest appropriate time to take an exam, while 8:00 a.m. is the time we were deemed effective enough to learn all the material on the exam?
If there is no real sense to how exams are scheduled then I say why not consider this: A marathon-exam day. All exams would be taken within 24 hours of the end of classes. “You either knew it or you blew it” on the test. (Hopefully, FUSA could make t-shirts to commemorate the event.) APK could begin it with a starter pistol on Bellarmine lawn and some sort of elaborate “pinning” ceremony. It would make just about as much sense as taking away our weekend, telling us to “read” on Sunday, and having 9:00 a.m. as the start time for exam days.
My sense as I wrap up this article – both thin on “hard” news and heavy on rhetoric – is that I will soon be expelled by the administration for “pushing their buttons” one too many times.
My expulsion will lead to John Ashcroft labeling me an “enemy combatant” for previous articles, and that my holidays will consist of spending time in a minimum-security prison in a cell next to Kenneth “Kenny-Boy” Lay, reading George W. Bush’s “A Charge To Keep,” with visits twice daily from Rush Limbaugh to “heal” my oh-so-radical soul. Hmm. So in closing, I say finals week is great and we shouldn’t change a thing! Keep on smilin’.
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