| Move The Exams Essay, Research Paper
There are two types of college students. Ones who were sent to college with mom s and dad s money and the others who work their way through school. There is no doubt that the stress that coming with juggling work and school is higher than average college student. For this working student, there requires a lot of thought, planning and secluding a routine that will satisfy both school and work. Ideally, this can be accomplished, considering the fact that there will be no interruptions throughout the semester. However, the main conflict that arises for a student takes a chemistry course at the University of Houston. The course comes with spontaneous Friday afternoon exams that interfere with both work and homework.
Most chemistry classes are held in the mornings, which is perfect for students who work in the afternoons because it gives an organized easy daily schedule. School in morning, work in the afternoon, and studying and homework at night. However, every year the chemistry courses hold their three midterms on three given Friday afternoons. They start at 5:30 and last until 7:00 that conflict with more than 50% of working students that take chemistry. All this conflict dose is cause unnecessary stress and anxiety than effects the little amount of time these students have to study for this chemistry exam.
Ideally, the chemistry course would give their midterm exams like any other course. Math, History, and Political Science use scheduled class times to distribute their exams. This type of testing, which could be used in chemistry, doesn t interfere or disrupt any students routine because an exams day is like any other day. Since exams on Friday are give an hour and a half for 20 questions and a regular class last one hour there could be a reduction of questions to 15.
The main reason chemistry classes should give it exams in their scheduled class times is for the consideration of the working student. The University of Houston has the nickname The Working College because well over 50% of the university s students work. That means 50% percent have a fixed daily routine and in come cases a mandatory routine and with Friday exams these routines are thrown off balance.
Another reason to move the exams in to the scheduled class time is the impact these Friday exams have on homework. It is not obvious but the way things are now impact the working student other courses. On a normal day, a student would have classes, including chemistry class, in the morning and then turn around and go to work in the afternoon. This leaves time for this student to study or do homework assigned by another professor at night. However, on exam days the Friday afternoons exams interfere with work causing the worker to work later, which doesn t leave time to do home work or study. This in turn lowers grades in other classes. So as any one can see, the exams on Friday afternoon create a confliction mess that could be avided.
There few objection to moving the exams into class times. Dr. Geanangel point out that the reason the department does afternoon test is because of the inability to cheat. A student that has a 9:00 class could give the answers to a 10:00 student if test were given during regular class hours. However, this type of cheating can easily be extinguished by not handing out the same test. By give different test questions to the different classes, this would eliminate that type of cheating.
Dr. Geanangel also point out that if we were to hand out exams during the regular class time we would lose precious time to learn. I agree with this, but on average, there are about two classes that are cancelled by the professors throughout each semester. I believe that missing two classes is a worse example of losing valuable time than would be to use those two days for exam days.
Since the department is reluctant to move is test, they could cancel them. Professor Reiter doesn t give midterm, instead he assigned homework from the back of each chapter and assigns different problems for each class. One might think that you could copy of each other from the same class but he puts his students in groups so they can work together on each problem and he grades on the uniqueness of the answers form each individual student.
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