By Diego Gaytan
Staff Writer for the Daily Toreador
With finals quickly approaching, many students of Texas Tech may feel they do not have enough time to prepare for their final exams.
Current Tech Student Government Association President Hayden Hatch is looking to expand dead day to give future Tech students more time to prepare for their final exams.
Making changes to the academic calendar is a complex issue since the calendar is set years in advance and must meet many guidelines, Hatch said.
“Whenever you try to change something, it touches many areas of the university, not just students,” he said. “It’s definitely going to be one of those projects that takes a while to implement, but I still think it’s worth working on even if I won’t see the benefits by the time I graduate.”
What he would like to see happen is to take Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off leading into the weekend and not start exams until Monday, Hatch said.
“It is modeled after other universities, University of Alabama, as what they call dead week,” he said.
Tech’s academic calendar is set in advance untill the 2017-2018 school year, according to the Tech Office of Official Publications.
Although the calendar is set years in advance, it does not mean it cannot be adjusted, Hatch said.
“Although it is very hard to change an academic calendar, it can be done,” he said. “People just have to make adjustments to it, and the biggest hurdle is going to be making sure we have enough student support.”
Hatch has already introduced the idea of an extended dead day to Tech officials.
“We (SGA) met with Provost (Lawrence) Schovanec last week and I brought it up as an idea we were interested in running on,” he said. “He was excited to hear the idea and he recommended we keep looking into it so it was good to know he was open to the idea”
Current SGA Internal Vice President BaLeigh Waldrop is also proposing including a fall break for future Tech students.
Although making a change to the academic calendar is difficult, after the 2017-2018 window, SGA can look into changing the calendar, she said.
“It is possible for us to look into things like the expansion of dead day and fall break,” she said. “It’s not something students now are going to see, but that’s how it goes with student government sometimes, we get to work on things, but we don’t get to see the fruit of them.”
SGA polled students about their opinion on the implementation of a fall break in the future, according to SGA resolution 49.111. A majority of students who were surveyed were in favor of the fall break.
SGA will meet with the Tech academic committee, Tech provost and academic schedulers to come up with an agreement regarding an expanded dead day and fall break.
These projects are feasible despite their difficulty, Waldrop said.
“The reason we even got to the discussion of this is because they started fall break initially because it was an SGA initiative,” she said. “It was a resolution they wrote four or five years ago and Tech had a fall break for a while.”
SOURCE: http://www.dailytoreador.com/news/article_b9a96bfc-d4cf-11e3-a8dc-0017a43b2370.html
