Release the exam schedule earlier!

Every fall when I return to our great, fair Bubble, I have about a month long grace period. Winter Break is still far away. This country doesn’t do Thanksgiving; so planning that holiday is off the table. Come October, though, the itchiness begins.

Emails from my mother start to conclude with more hope than I can muster: “Maybe this year they’ll release the exam dates early!”

Logging onto airline websites, I watch the flipping charts. Each day, their digits increase. From Edinburgh to DC, they begin at a cheery 700-ish. They steadily increase daily, until the end of the month. Right before the University decides they are ready to release the order of the days I can sit in a drafty room and scribble papers worth 60% of my mark, the flights skyrocket. Kayak and Orbitz inform me that now the only way to get home for the former price is to go to Vancouver first.

For a university that prides themselves on their international student population, the glacial pace of their exam schedule release is laughable. As a non-UK student, you have two options.  You can do what I unfortunately must, and book flights after the University has taken their sweet time about it. Or you can play International Flight Roulette. Rubbing your exam dates lamp genie, you find a calendar and place your finger on a hopefully auspicious date. If the Exam Gods look on you favourably, you will find out several months later that your expensive international flight is on a day after your last exam. If not, sorry Charlie. Let the change-of-date fees begin.

There is, of course, the official University position that all students are supposed to stay in St Andrews until December 20^th. Who does that? Who CAN do that? Some people don’t even have exams, but large course work submissions. Is it fair that they should have to stick around until a few days before Christmas too?

Exam diets are miserable enough. There’s no sunlight, you can never find a library plug, and sleep becomes a far off fairytale. Many of us would love to be able to hop on trains to get home. But that’s not a plausible reality for a large portion of the student population. As the demographics of the student body changes, so too should the exam release dates. International education requires considerations of practicality, and in this area, this is a glaring lack of such.

Image courtesy of blogs.marketwatch.com