New schedule to reduce students' final exam crunch this semester

By Susan S. Lang

Thanks to some fancy number crunching by two Cornell operations research faculty members and a graduate student, the number of undergraduate students facing three finals in a 24-hour period this May will fall by roughly 85 percent from what the average was over the previous three spring terms.

Likewise, the number of students facing three exams in the same day will drop by about 75 percent and those having back-to-back exams should fall by about 65 percent of what they were over the past three springs.

"Kudos to Professors Bob Bland and David Shmoys in operations research and grad student Dmitriy Levchenkov for pulling this off," said Charles Walcott, the dean of the faculty. He said that he'd received many complaints around finals time in the past from unhappy students who faced three exams in one day or back-to-back finals with just 30 minutes between them. "Students often had to ask their professors to give them make-ups because of back-to-back exams," Walcott said. "That required a lot of negotiations, especially for professors of large classes."

Under the new schedule, which was constructed by optimization techniques commonly used in a wide variety of business and government settings, only 51 students who pre-registered for their courses will have three exams in a 24-hour period. That's down from 341 students that would have had three exams in one day under the old method of scheduling finals.

Since the new method uses pre-enrollment data, the best way for students to ensure they don't get a nightmare finals schedule is to pre-register each semester. By pre-registering, students get their schedules input into Cornell's new mathematical model for scheduling finals.

The new scheduling model is the result of a Student Assembly resolution passed in spring 2000, which urged the Faculty Senate to find ways to reduce student stress during finals weeks. Walcott's predecessor, J. Robert Cooke, professor of biological and environmental engineering, formed a task force in 2002 to address scheduling issues and turned to Bland and Shmoys, knowing that their field of operations research engineering specializes in developing more efficient ways of handling data and processes.

"We are very pleased to have worked with Professors Bland and Shmoys in working through the revisions and arriving at this decision," said David Yeh, the university registrar and assistant vice president of student and academic services. Cindy Sedlacek, an expert on the university's student data, played a crucial role by extracting and analyzing the historical and current data into a form suitable for the optimization methods. "Without her tireless efforts, there is no way this project would ever have even started," said Shmoys.

And yet another change is in the works. Timon Stasko, engineering '07, proposed that finals have a different daily schedule to give students longer breaks between exams. Stasko and Yeh collaborated on the idea and have proposed that instead of finals being separated by only half an hour and running from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., they would be separated by 2.5 hours. The proposed final exam times would be 9 to 11:30 a.m., 2 to 4:30 p.m. and 7 to 9:30 p.m. That way, students with back-to-back exams will have time to rest, eat and review materials before their next exam. The Student Assembly has endorsed the new schedule, said Yeh, who has posted a very short survey on this proposed schedule that he encourages students to fill out at http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/examsurvey/.

"The survey, although nonbinding, offers students an opportunity to share their opinions," Yeh said. He noted that the revision of the finals schedules is an excellent example of the kind of collaboration that students, faculty and administrators from the colleges and university can forge to make a difference.