The fall break conundrum

In the initial news report announcing the fall break, Susan Searls Giroux, associate vice-president (Faculty), stated that the purpose of the full week fall break is, “to improve academic performance and mental health and well-being.”

The first phase of a study conducted by postdoctoral fellows at the McMaster Institute for Innovation and Excellence in Learning from earlier this year showed that close to 80 percent of McMaster students reported that the Fall Break was beneficial for increasing academic performance and reducing stress.

The concern and worry comes when considering the 20 percent of students who reported the break as being detrimental. The likely conclusion of the second phase of this study will be about workloads before and after the break as the leading stressor to students who dislike the current break. Loading up tests or evaluations in a short period of time would stress almost anyone out, even if there is a lot of preparation time.

Is it actually possible to make a timetable that would decrease the stress of this 20 percent? With courses needing a required set of tests and assessments, how do you balance these out to fit a bit of an awkward timescale, grade all of the content necessary and not need to front or backload the material for memorization?

Take your typical class that has some minor assignments, two midterms and an exam. Since a term has thirteen weeks of lectures until exams, it would seem to make sense to have a midterm on the fourth or fifth week and another on the eighth or ninth week. This isn’t actually what happens.

Having a midterm after the break is the sixth week of lectures for the year, and odds are your second midterm will be on the 10th or 11th week. With a cumulative exam, the third leg of your course is compressed so that the exam reviews more material that the previous tests already covered. This also pushes back the schedule for whatever review or introductions you do in week one. The post-break work makes sense for a lot of courses.

If there is a push to shift work to be further after the break, this would realistically only work for courses that would have one midterm. One in the seventh week out of 13 makes logical sense.

The only real solution is for some courses to move their midterms to before the break. What happens is that the first midterm is then worth less than the second because the first has less material due to less lecture time.

However, McMaster has already identified these timings and has had these plans of action for years, even before the extended break. Evidently, this still is not enough for some. Why?

While it is possible that some courses simply aren’t up to par with how they structure themselves, the answer is probably a lot simpler than that. The actual crux of the fall break dilemma is personal preference.

Do you prefer having all of your assessments at once with larger breaks or more evenly distributed? Do you like to be able to study over the break or use it to relax? Do you like having evaluations closer to exams for material to stay fresh or further away for longer review time? If you ask a number of people these questions and how they like to space their time out, you might get a different answer from every single one of them.

Anyone not in first year probably already knows this if you have ever asked more than one person how they felt about their exam schedule. Just add three more months and countless other graded assessments to make up the entire term.

There are so many research questions and thesis statements about how students like to learn, study and take tests, but so few about how they like their schedule to be for these things. Course evaluations have dozens of questions about the TAs and professors, but fewer about the course itself and only indirect connections with the timetable at best. With the introduction of the fall break that began last year at McMaster, the process for best working with it has not been given the priority it should by nearly any faculty on campus.

If McMaster wants to find solutions to help all of its students succeed, the answers will start with looking deeper into the biggest change its academic schedule has ever had and finding out what the students really want.