Faculty Senate blocking any dead week policy changes
Published: May 3, 2010
Students may be feeling the stress of dead week, which starts today, but for those hoping to see a change in dead week policy, it is going to take more than a wish to see any action.
On March 9, 2009, the Faculty Senate voted 19-12 not to amend dead week regulations until at least 2014, according to The Daily’s archive.
In spring 2008 elections, 93 percent of more than 8,000 students voted for a change in dead week policy. The OU Faculty Handbook doesn’t use the term “dead week” but does define some pre-finals week policies.
The policy allows faculty to cover new material during pre-finals week. It also allows assignments worth 10 percent or less of the class’s total grade to be due during pre-finals week, according to the OU Faculty Handbook.
Assignments worth more than 10 percent of the class’s total grade must be assigned at least 30 days in advance if it is due during pre-finals week, according to the handbook.
Before the Faculty Senate vote in March 2009, Student Congress attempted to amend the dead week policy.
Leading up to the vote, Kurt Davidson, former congress chairman, encouraged the Faculty Senate to change the policy from 10 percent to 5 percent.
After the Faculty Senate’s decision not to amend the policy until 2014, the The Oklahoma Daily Editorial Board criticized UOSA for fighting the wrong battle.
“[UOSA] should have tried to implement truly significant change — eliminating required classes and all assignments during dead week completely, for instance, or stop griping about that extra 5 percent,” the editorial board wrote.
In reply to The Daily’s editorial, Davidson wrote a letter to the editor that said, “Congress aimed for reforms that would make pre-finals week closer to a true dead period. However, ideas such as that were immediately shut down, and we chose to work with the Faculty Senate to compromise ... what was left after compromise was essentially a clearer version of the same policy with a slight reduction in the amount of work allowed for the week.”
Davidson said the Faculty Senate blatantly ignored the feelings of the student body with its decision.
Comments
frye4073 1 year, 9 months ago
Try having 3 exams, 2 projects worth 10% of the final grade, and 4 homework assignments as an Aerospace Engineer and then maybe you can have a relevant comment
soonerboomers 1 year, 9 months ago
Students need to stop crying. If you cannot handle exams without a week of downtime at the University of Joklahoma, you don't deserve a degree.
LauraGibbs 1 year, 9 months ago
I agree that procrastination is the main problem. Either of the arguments for dead week strike me as very weak: either students want their professors to help them organize their time (i.e., students cannot balance their work load to reserve time for studying before exams, so they want one week to be designated "study week" because they cannot manage to plan on that for themselves), or else students actually want less work to be assigned in their courses (to have a 14-week semester rather than a 15-week semester). I really don't see how either of those arguments is going to reflect well on the students and earn a lot of faculty support (except, of course, that there are some faculty who would probably be glad to have a one-week reduction in their workload, too, since, like students, some faculty are overwhelmed by the number of commitments they have taken on).
Personally, I would prefer to see the elimination of final exams entirely since it is a very poor assessment mechanism that brings out the worst in many students (procrastination, cramming, no useful feedback, etc.). I'm guessing everybody would be better served if we talked about trying to find really good evaluation methods other than finals, rather than spending all this time on the argument about dead week and finals. Just speaking for myself, I would prefer to have a 16-week semester with the flexibility to build other kinds of assessments into the course and no final examination period at all. That seems to me much more likely to result in real educational improvement than having required finals for courses.
LauraGibbs 1 year, 9 months ago
I also find it very discouraging that "dead week" is the only instruction-related issue to which the Daily returns again and again and again and yet again in its coverage. It's already quite disappointing that in general the Daily does not provide very much education-related coverage. If the reporters do not think there are issues worth covering from a student perspective, just read the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Inside Higher Ed, etc. to see the topics being addressed there. It would be great for the Daily to be out there doing real investigative reporting on matters related to instruction, curriculum, majors, etc. at the University of Oklahoma, but instead we get this endless discussion of dead week. I keep hoping every year that the Daily will significantly bump up its instruction-related reporting, especially if they undertook some real investigative journalism on education-related topics, but in the 10 years I've been at OU, that has not happened. Well, maybe next year...
LauraGibbs 1 year, 9 months ago
I decided to do some investigative journalism here of my own, at least for my own classes - because these classes are online, students can complete the course early, and have themselves a complete dead week, already having received the final grade for this class. Today, Monday, there are still 38 students out of 85 who have not finished the course - which is to say that, given the opportunity to make their own dead week in my class, 45% of students do not do so. They opt to continue the coursework into Week 15. That means it was worth it to barely half of the students to wrap up their coursework in Week 14 of the semester, giving themselves a dead week before finals, at least in my course. Whatever the students choose to do is fine with me, of course - but the fact that only about half of them take advantage of the opportunity to create their own dead week makes me think that the problem with dead week (if there is one; I'm not convinced that there is) would be something due to choices made by students as well as any choices being made by faculty.
soonerboomers 1 year, 9 months ago
Exams are easy. Try having one 30-page paper that counts for 100% of your grade, another 30-page paper that counts for 40% of your grade, a 15-page paper that counts for 40% of your grade, a 6-page paper that counts for 25% of your grade, and 1 exam.
Oh right. It isn't difficult because we are students and we should be able to handle doing school. It is not like you learned about these dinky little projects and assignments yesterday. Stop procrastinating.
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