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FSEC dicusses final exams week
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
Neither slick roads nor snow drifts nor a single-digit wind chill could stop the Faculty Senate Executive Committee from meeting yesterday to discuss a subject that feels far off amid current weather conditions: final exams week.
Terri Mangione, senior associate vice provost for student academic records and financial services, said the process of updating the way in which final exams are scheduled at UB began with a survey in December 2005 of faculty and staff to gauge what they liked or didn't like about finals.
The current finals-scheduling program was written by graduate business students 15 years ago and badly needs to be replaced, according to Mangione.
"It was written with a maximum capacity for approximately 1,500 exams, which we are approaching and have exceeded on occasion," she said. "And with anticipated increases in the number of students at UB and the number of courses, it will be beyond its capacity very soon."
The survey asked questions about several issues regarding finals, including whether the exams should be held in the same space that the class meets; if students taking the exam should be arranged by "double seating" (adding empty seats between students to allow them more room and discourage copying); and if finals week, currently a seven-day period, should be shorter or longer.
Of the 222 faculty who responded to the survey, Mangione said that 85 percent said they either would prefer to give finals in the same room where their classes are taught or had no preference as to where the exams are given; 58 percent said they preferred three-hour blocks of time for the exams; 67 percent were satisfied with double seating; and 76 percent were satisfied with a seven-day exam period.
A vast majority of the student respondents—98 percent of 1,129 total respondents—said they also either preferred to take the final in the room in which the class was held or had no preference where they took it; 87 percent were satisfied with a three-hour exam period—but 65 percent added they had taken just one or had never taken such a long exam—and with double seating; and 73 percent were satisfied with the seven-day exam period.
Majorities of both faculty and student respondents also favored keeping the two reading days that are part of exam week, and students favored moving the two-day reading period to the following week if those days landed on Saturdays or Sundays during finals week.
"It was very clear that nobody wants a final exam period that is more than seven days and nobody really wants to get rid of the two reading days," Mangione said.
She said her office plans to create course-centric exam schedules for UB to minimize scheduling conflicts and to offer more flexible options for exam duration and seating, and to make the schedules available at the time of course registration each semester. Mangione noted that her office is working with administrative computing on the task and would welcome suggestions from faculty members during the process.
Next, Mangione discussed what often appears to be a larger, sometimes seemingly insurmountable, problem at UB: assigning classroom space throughout the university.
Departments manage the use of 152 classrooms throughout the university, Mangione said, while her office schedules the remaining 134 classrooms in which 2,438 courses are being taught in the current semester.
The classroom spaces on the North Campus easily exceed the national benchmark in classroom utilization, which shows 67 percent of space being used over a 45-hour week. However, none of the classrooms on the South Campus or in the Ellicott Complex reach this point, even in a shorter 35-hour week, Mangione said.
Barbara Rittner, associate dean for external affairs in the School of Social Work, suggested that the signage directing people to individual classrooms be improved, especially in the Ellicott Complex.
Gayle Brazeau, associate dean for academic affairs for the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, asked whether the university has any contingency plan in the case of emergency loss or shutdown of any classroom buildings.
Michael Ryan, vice provost and dean of undergraduate education, who also attended the meeting, said such a situation arose following the fire in the Law School in March 2005, but added that Mangione and her staff worked quickly to reassign class spaces.
"They managed to deal mid-semester in a very short time frame to re-situate classes, but it is a nightmare scenario for me. We are very hard-pressed to deal with a contingency of that nature should it occur," Ryan said.
Mangione also reassured Brazeau that a particular classroom—Wende 114—has been renovated and now is a "state-of-the-art, almost stadium-seating facility," and said another classroom next to it also was renovated and will have technology added to it this summer.
Ryan and Mangione asked faculty members to give their ideas regarding such spaces.
"Facilities has done an outstanding job with the updates. Now the thinking is how might we multipurpose some of the rooms," Ryan said. "We would like to have more direct input from faculty who are the users of these spaces."
In other business, the FSEC learned that the American Library Association has accepted a plan from the Department of Library and Information Studies to clear the conditional accreditation it received last year, and that the department has chosen a new home.
As part of her report of the senate's academic planning committee meeting, Lucinda Finley, vice provost for faculty affairs, said that faculty members in the library and information studies department voted at the end of January to move to the Graduate School of Education. The relocation comes as a result of last year's dissolution of the School of Informatics.
Faculty members in the former school's other constituent department, communication, also voted, choosing to relocate to the College of Arts and Sciences. The FSEC voted to receive the report following Finley's remarks.