In light of this semester’s finals schedule, a Cal State Long Beach professor has decided to propose a resolution to the College of Liberal Arts Faculty Council to change the fall 2014 finals schedule.
“I was just struck [by] how odd the [fall 2013] finals schedule was,” said Jeffrey Blutinger, director of the Jewish Studies Program. “It’s confusing for students and faculty. It sets up an odd dynamic.”
Whereas past semesters have seen finals week begin on a Monday and end the following Friday, this semester’s finals begin on Thursday, Dec. 12 and end on Wednesday, Dec. 18.
On Dec. 4, Blutinger will ask the CLA Faculty Council to endorse a resolution that would ask the Executive Committee of the Academic Senate to return CSULB to the 2012-13 finals schedules.
With the resolution, Blutinger said that he hopes the day before Thanksgiving will be an instructional day again so that finals can begin on a Monday rather than mid-week on a Thursday.
“I’ve been teaching here for 10 years, and I’ve never seen it like this before,” he said. “Students have almost no time between the end of classes and beginning of finals.”
The reason for this semester’s finals schedule change revolves around the number of instructional days, according to an email sent to CLA faculty last week.
Without holding classes on Dec. 9 and 10, the university would not meet the requirement for the number of instructional days, which is 145 days, according to the email.
To accommodate for the split-week schedule, students are being given a “dead day,” or study day, on Wednesday, Dec. 11, one day before finals begin.
Some students, like senior psychology major Alexxis Acosta, said they find the new finals schedule somewhat confusing.
“I think it’s confusing how it overlaps into the next week,” she said. “I would rather have it all in one week. I like the extra day, but you’re just stressing out when finals split up like that.”
Other students, like senior social work major Maria Jiminez, said they think that the finals schedule for Wednesday-only classes is inconvenient because it falls on the dead day.
“I still have a final on the [dead] day,” Jiminez said. “I don’t think it’s fair because students that have a Wednesday night class still have a final on the day that students are supposed to have an extra day to study.”
If the CLA Faculty Council endorses the resolution, Blutinger said he believes it will hold more significance than if he went to the Academic Senate first, without the CLA’s approval.
“I think a proposal to change it would be more weighty coming from the entire CLA,” he said.
In an email sent to the CLA, Blutinger said that in addition to CSULB, 17 Cal State University campuses are on the semester system. Of those 17, 10 campuses begin their finals on a Monday and the remaining seven use a split-week finals schedule, according to Blutinger.
“There’s no reason why we couldn’t have had a semester beginning on Aug. 26, with finals beginning on [Dec. 9] and only two days off for Thanksgiving,” Blutinger said via email.
Assistant Opinions Editor Nicolas Rodriguez contributed to this report.