An e-mail came around from the Vice President for Studying and Teaching here at the University of Not-Bielefeld the other week informing us about the increasing number of student reports reaching her office about examinations, and final exams in particular, being scheduled during the 14-week lecture periods instead of immediately after them like they should be.
As always, any e-mail coming from central admin from the University always raises more questions for me than answers. For starters, what ever happened to memos? Admin always used to ruin your day with memos, not e-mails. Is there even such a thing as memos anymore? What about e-memos? (Or the Apple equivalent in the form of iMemos?) Sadly, the answer would appear to be no. A bit of exhaustive research later (i.e., my usual quick and dirty Google search) revealed that e-memos are really only being offered up by Microsoft these days with their only apparent customer being the Turkish Armed Forces, which tried the app out the one time way back in 2007 and then very unsuccessfully so.
Slightly more to the point, but still not really relevant, does the title Vice President for Studying and Teaching strike anyone else as being more than a little stilted? Granted, it is the literal English translation of Vizepräsidentin für Studium und Lehre, but I still feel that something like learning is the more appropriate counterpoint to teaching than studying is. Even “studies” would be an improvement. But, given that we are talking (eventually) about examinations here, let’s just run with studying for the time being and return to that e-mail.
Now, in addition to pointing out all the regulations that are being broken by holding final exams during the lecture period, the e-mail also goes beyond this simple and normally sufficient appeal to authority to actually and unusually explain why those regulations are there in the first place. The key reason here is that all the studying that is being done for those finals means that the students aren’t showing up for the teaching in their other classes, something that I’ve experienced many times firsthand in my lectures. And if the studying isn’t keeping the students away, then sometimes it’s the writing because those other teachers sometimes set their exams outside of the time slot of their course and inside of yours. But, fortunately, our VP for Cramming and Droning has promised to crack down on this slightly rude practice starting in the Fall.
It all sounds good, but then again this is exactly what lip service is supposed to sound like …
For starters, this problem is by no means a recent phenomenon and has been going on since I first arrived at the University of Not-Bielefeld over 15 years ago now. So either those reports have been really slow in arriving or the realization as to what they mean has. Take your pick.
And, just like with many other administratively illegal activities on campus, it is possible to get around this one too so long as you write a simple letter of justification as to why it’s necessary. So much for those regulations.
Most importantly, there’s no possible way that the President’s Office could not have known anything about all this until those increasing number of reports blew the lid off the “scandal”. You see, although we teaching staff set our own examination dates, we also still need to register all those dates with and have them approved by the central Examinations Office. (Well, we should be registering them all. Technically I also need to do this with each and every one of the graded presentations I make the students do during the lecture period too but somehow I have better things to do than registering dozens of examinations per year. Like, for instance, actually teaching. Or grading those presentations.) In other words, there was no need to wait on those reports from the students because the profs were already dutifully reporting all their illegal activities for them. For years now. And the Examinations Office was equally dutifully rubberstamping it all for just as long.
All of which means that your guess is as good as mine as to why this issue was now suddenly worthy of such vice-presidential indignation …
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