After a long year of studying, the last thing many students looked forward to was finals. Ideally students would spend Memorial Day weekend relaxing, looking back on all the accomplishments made this year. Leading up to exams, the thought of not having the weekend spent relaxing was frustrating..
Final exams week felt new this year, but historically, Haverford has always had exams.
“Prior to COVID, exams always existed after Memorial Day Weekend. There seems to be no way to have them before Memorial Day,” said Head of the Upper School Mr. Mark Fifer.
Mr. Fifer explains this is due to when commencement falls. According to Mr. Fifer, commencement typically falls two weeks after Memorial Day Weekend.” Since the school year cannot end mid-May, it isn’t justifiable to “stop classes… in order to run exams prior to Memorial Day,” Mr. Fifer said.
Another scheduling challenge is what to do with the weeks after Memorial Day.
“We would have a two-week block after Memorial Day that we… wouldn’t know what to do with. Ultimately, we wanted to protect class time,” Mr. Fifer said.
It raises the question, is it possible to have IC Day, along with other “fun” activities pushed to after Memorial Day?
According to Mr. Fifer, “some schools do exams before… and then run the equivalent of an experiential education program after Memorial Day.” But that model would raise new challenges for the school.
“We don’t necessarily have the infrastructure right now to be able to do that because the IC Day we have is a one-day experience, and so moving to an experiential education program that would be multiple days…would require a significant institutional commitment…financially… [and] we would be reducing the number of class days,” Mr. Fifer said.
“We built in two days of review [for exams.] The issue with this is timing the review days around Memorial Day,” Mr. Fifer said. “Placing these review days adjacent to Memorial Day makes it tough.”
However, families go away for Memorial Day, and some students don’t make it to these important review days. Attendance challenges arose “even when it was a regular school day because many students left,” Mr. Fifer said.
It seems as if there could be some potential investigation into these days. Mr. Fifer notes that the school has statistics on attendance and it is something the school will be looking at.
Mr. Fifer jokingly laments, “it’s a funky time…the end of the school year being around Memorial Day and where our graduation falls, June 7th.”
“Trying to get exams in, also provide as much contact time with classes as possible and then account for the Holiday weekend,” is quite a task, Mr. Fifer said.
Ultimately, if possible in the future, the best use of finals week is before Memorial Day, giving students the opportunity to enjoy their weekend looking back at their accomplishments, all the while looking forward to the opportunity to learn in an experiential way.
While it might be a tall task financially and logistically, exams prior to Memorial Day is certainly something worth investigating.
