Avoiding Final Exam Conflicts
By Nehemiah Slaughter
Corsair Staff Writer

• Academic Senate members decide on using computers to prevent exam conflicts.

The Santa Monica College Academic Senate voted yesterday 29-16 in favor of a three-hour final exam schedule that enables computers to alter time or room configurations when scheduling conflicts occur.

Initially, the Academic Senate postponed a motion to vote on the issue of altering the current final exam schedule due to a lack of input from the student government. Throughout the preliminary process of developing proposals for a new final exam schedule, faculty members were the only ones consulted via surveys and discussion.

Over the past few meetings, Academic Senate members have discussed and debated three different final exam schedule proposals.

The first proposal is to keep the current system. The second is to reduce the time limit to two and half hours instead of three. The third is to have a three-hour final exam schedule based in a computer system that would have the ability to adjust time and room configurations when there are time conflicts. Also, this proposal would create coded time slots that would be listed with all classes in the schedule of classes catalog.

“A very small selection of classes, the ones with conflicts, would be the ones selected to be rescheduled,” said Academic Senate President Gordon Dossett.

“The thing about proposal three that makes it different from option one is that the final exam slot for each class will be listed right with the class,” said chemistry professor Dr. Peggy Kline. “It would say final exam period B1, so students would not have to interpret final exam schedules. They have it in front of their faces, they have to look at it.”

Since the Academic Senate has chosen which final exam schedule to implement, they must present the proposal to the Faculty Association. Farther down the line, the proposal would then finally end up on the table of administration for final approval.

According to Dossett, the Academic Senate plans to implement some portion of the proposal by the spring semester. Most likely, the coded time slots for final exams will not be able to enter the schedule of classes catalog for spring 2003. However, the college might be able to execute the computer-generated schedule of classes. In the event that neither of these actions are possible before spring 2003, the adjustments to the final exam schedule would be done by fall 2003.

“Most of the faculty felt that it’s better to have some slight movement of classes and notify students ahead of time,” said Dossett.

At the last minute, student government representatives ICC Chairperson Marcos J. Lazaro and Alex Zecena, commissioner of Academic Support, said students support the third proposal, and they also presented a fourth proposal to the Academic Senate in yesterday’s meeting. This proposal involved a two-day period between the last day of class and the first day of finals. The two days wouldn’t have any classes scheduled during the time and would give students a chance to get in some possibly needed study time.

“I think if you guys give this a test run for next semester, I guarantee, in all your classes and departments, you’ll see an increase in grades,” said Zecena.

In addition, Lazaro and Zecena proposed the final schedule of exams be available during enrollment time and have graduation the day after the last final exam.

“It would have been better if we had enough time to bring the proposals to all students, look at the statistics behind the decision, determine how many students it would affect and how much would the third option benefit the students,” said Lazaro.

Members of the Academic Senate took the student government proposal into consideration as they discussed and finally voted on the third proposal.