We are at the end of the semester and the wonderful time of hell week. I have four classes. One has a plain ol’ final on the last day in the last time slot. Another has a final problem set that is due the last day of class. A third has a written project due the last day of class as well as an oral final during exam week. Then there’s the glorious fourth class with its three finals. There is an oral final during the second to last class (by the time you read this, I will have finished that) and a grammar final the last day. Oh, and the take-home portion that is due electronically the first day of finals. So basically, if I make it through the last week of classes, then I get to frolic until the semester is over.
What ever happened to plain old final exams? In any sort of humanities course, you’re more likely to have final papers and projects. I suppose that it makes more sense than having everyone sit down for an exam, but it defeats the purpose of reading period a little. Reading period is so that you can breathe and prepare for finals. Having work over that stretch increases stress and you lose a bit of focus for whichever final is first. By the time the last day of exams rolls around, I will be well-rested; but for the few assignments that are looming, I may not sleep very much. And only so much can be blamed on procrastination.
An eight-question math assignment can take me anywhere from ten to twenty hours, so a five-question final should take me 6.25 to 12.5 hours; we will be given the problem set on Wednesday at about three o’clock, and it is due Friday at 1:30. So I have to make sure my schedule is practically clear Wednesday and Thursday night -- but I do have a class in Towson on Thursday, so that’s a four hour chunk missing. You know what you shouldn’t rush? Writing in general. But a slip up like missing a comma won’t destroy a paper. However, a neglected negative sign can radically change your answer and screw up your entire proof. No pressure.
A friend of mine was talking about her class where they were also given two days to work on a set of four problems, but these are paragraphs not proofs. Regardless, she said that she has to write three pages per question. That’s 12 pages total, which I understand to be intense for a social science course. She’s also in my three-finals-in-one-week foreign language class. She’s got a fair amount on her plate for this week.
For my other foreign language class, I have a five-page illustrated story due the day that this issue of the News-Letter is published. It’s a final draft of an assignment we already did, but we have to connect each part of our episodic story as well as add a conclusion. We need a steady plot and at least one new picture. We also have to underline all fifty vocabulary words that we used. It’s not that this is hard, per se. It’s just that it takes a lot of focus and patience to make sure everything is formatted correctly. It’s one of those if-the-font-is-not-Times-New-Roman-you-lose-five-points classes (I’m really liking my hyphens today).
So having three set hours to vomit back, organize, and apply all the information I learned through the semester seems almost like a sigh of relief.
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