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January 25, 2008 > News > Faculty senate approves new calendar for fall ‘09

Faculty senate approves new calendar for fall ‘09

By Sarah Rutledge | Thresher Editorial Staff

Students haunted by the threat of having spring break revoked with a new academic calendar may rest assured now — the break will stay.

The new calendar, approved almost unanimously by the Faculty Senate Wednesday, will also have an extra week for the winter break and a common week-long exam period for seniors and non-seniors. The common examination period for all students will go into effect next spring. The rest of the academic calendar, however, will not take effect until fall 2009.

The Faculty Senate passed the calendar, called Plan A, with one “no” and three abstentions in the vote. The alternative plan, Plan B, was identical to Plan A, but did not include the spring recess.

Under Plan A, fall classes start the Monday between Aug. 20 and Aug. 26. Midterm recess will occur Monday and Tuesday of the eighth of the semester, with the same Thursday and Friday Thanksgiving break observed. Fall semester will be 15 weeks long. After the last class, seniors as well as undergraduates will have Saturday through Tuesday as study days in preparation for final exams.

In the spring semester of the 2009-‘10 school year, the calendar proposes the last day of classes on Apr. 17. Finals will last one week, from Apr. 22 to Apr. 29.

Because finals for all students end before May, the registrar’s office will continue to calculate graduating students’ grades and academic distinctions, including the cum laude titles, before they walk across the stage to receive their diploma.

With the current academic calendar, degree candidates are not allotted study days before final exams in the spring and have six days for finals.

Registrar David Tenney (Sid ‘87), a member of the academic calendar committee along with Ecology and Evolutionary Biology professor Evan Siemann and Associate Dean of Architecture John Casbarian, said the study days would prove invaluable to degree candidates, who also need time to prepare for exams.

“Now everybody gets study days, not just freshmen and sophomores, but now seniors, who in many instances need it the most,” Tenney said. “I think the reason this hasn’t come up before is because they graduate and are gone. I think if any [graduated students] were to come back they’d say it isn’t fair. We wanted to give them the same opportunities the other undergraduates have.”

Siemann said he thinks everyone is satisfied with the vote.

“In some sense, it was the notion that I was out to get spring recess at all costs and that’s a mischaracterization,” Siemann said. “I prefer Plan B, but everyone in the Faculty Senate was happy with [Plan A], and I don’t think anyone’s upset at this point.”

Faculty Senate Speaker Deborah Harter said the spring recess was another contentious issue, with the fear of losing spring recess being a common concern among students and faculty.

Harter also said students may have been alarmed because they thought decisions were already being made about the calendar. However, she said nothing was decided until the committee presented the academic calendar proposals.

Some classes, including lab courses, often meet during holidays, including during spring break, Siemann said. He said this presents a problem and often comes as a shock for students enrolled in these courses, especially whom did not plan to spend their break studying. In keeping the spring break, he said the course catalogs and syllabi in these courses will more clearly inform students of this possibility.

“A number of classes meet on break days because of the partial weeks,” Siemann said. “So what do you do when your lab falls on break? Instruct over the break. Probably some people who find out they’re going to be taking a class meeting over break days and are not happy about it can plan their lives around it.”

Tenney said the committee usually decides upon an academic calendar in the fall. The reason for the delay in reaching a consensus this year, he said, had to do with a painstaking effort to thoroughly meet as many students’ and faculty members’ needs as possible. Tenney said the calendar planning committee went through decades of Rice history to research past academic calendars from the 1950s through the 1970s in reaching their proposals.

The new academic calendar is matrix driven, which means that it adjusts itself automatically by year, accounting for leap years and changes in weekdays. The matrix-driven calendar prevents against possible errors, like moving the first day of classes to Jan. 8 if the first Monday happens to be Jan. 1. Tenney said the new calendar will be helpful in its matrix format, which will allow the registrar’s office to post academic calendar up to two years ahead of the current school year.

Representatives from the Student Association, including the Academic Committee, presented their own academic calendar proposal to the Faculty Senate at the meeting. This proposal included results from their poll earlier this year about the proposed Plan A and Plan B for the academic calendar. Of the 701 students who participated in the poll, 94 percent supported Plan A, with the spring recess, and six percent supported Plan B.

Tenney said the SA poll results had a strong influence on the senate’s decision to vote for Plan A.

“I particularly appreciate the fact that they got student involvement and input on the issue,” he said. “It means a lot when a person can say, ‘This is not the way I feel but the way 700 people feel.’ It’s like signing a petition. It’s helpful to get the full story from students, and I think the [SA is] to be commended.”

SA President Laura Kelley said she thought the meeting went very well.

“The senators took the resolution at face value,” Kelley, a Brown College senior, said. “There were a few of us [students] there at the meeting, but the fact that 700 students answered the poll was more significant. Hopefully this will bolster input on future polls.”

Jones College junior Chuan Li, who took part in the SA’s academic calendar poll, said he is glad the Faculty Senate voted to keep spring recess.

“I really wouldn’t mind starting earlier in August or starting earlier in the spring,” Li said. “I totally support that. I would hate to have that gone because I’m doing alternative spring break. So it is a break, but I would still like to keep that other four-day weekend.”

Harter said some members of the faculty senate were bothered by the different amounts of instructional days in both semesters. The fall semester will have 69 teaching days and 67 in the spring semester. She said some members of the senate were in favor of adding two days to the spring semester, but currently there are no solid plans to change either semester’s number of instructional days.

End of article

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