Misread?

For most University students, the weeklong chunk of unscheduled time called Reading Week serves as a solid framework for independent study. All of us ask ourselves: Will I spend the week holed up in my room like a monk? Will I again procrastinate and spend most of my time partying? Or, rather, will I find a happy medium? Regardless of how you spend your time, the fact that the administration allows us such a freeform study period implies that they trust us to make adult choices. For an institution that hopes to prepare its students for life after graduation, such encouragement of responsible planning can only aid it in its mission.

It is for this reason that we disagree with the decision, recently finalized by the Educational Policy Committee (EPC), to fundamentally change the structure of Reading Week. Starting this semester, days for study and final exam schedules will be organized such that two days of free time will alternate with two days of exams until the end of the semester. The reasons for this, according to the EPC, were twofold: one, to allow students to go home earlier and thus avoid holiday traffic; and two, to curb the amount of “free time” that students have. This curtailment of extended unstructured time, says the committee, should encourage responsible studying.

If a study period isn’t supposed to be a chunk of free time, then what exactly is it supposed to be? The point of Reading Week is to allow students to study and socialize in a manner that fits with their workload. By regimenting our time in this manner, the University fails to take into account the wide variety of pressures students contend with at the end of each semester. If they truly believe that their students should learn to be responsible, they should prove their faith in us by allowing us to budget our own study time.