A friend of mine is a mathematics professor at a college in the southeast (where they’re currently expecting significant snowfall) and just asked an interesting question that I’m reposting here:
“I’m currently teaching a four-week class, and next week is the final week. There is a good chance that the college will be closed Friday due to the weather, but Friday is also scheduled to be an exam day.
How should I handle this? I cannot afford to use the last Monday as the new exam day. My initial thought is that I could post it as take-home exam with strict warnings about using resources, but we can probably guess how well that will go.”
I’m sure that she would appreciate any suggestions you might have, and I am also curious to see what they might be.
This is a college level issue. The school should come up with a plan for how such a problem should be handled. It seems absurd to ask each individual professor to come up with a specific plan for his/her own students.
I think many of us are running into this. We’ve been back in for two weeks and I’ve lost four days in a four-day-a-week class between MLK and weather-related incidents (yay building flooding too!). Thankfully it’s early enough I can make reasonable adjustments.
At my university, we are given relatively wide berth to reschedule and work around campus closures and based on the question, it seems the situation is similar, so here are some of the possibilities I’d see:
- Take home exam with regularly scheduled Monday
Not optimal, because they’d end up just cheating as it will be hard to rewrite a test designed for classroom-taking for home-taking in such a short time, but essay-style tests may work okay (doubt that’s the case for a math course, though) - Reschedule the test day on the weekend.
It may seem a bit dickish, but you could reschedule for Sunday and then handle the handful of no shows individually (this presumes that the weather is okay by Sunday, Saturday looks to be a no-go all over). Students will kill you on evals for this. - Move the test to Monday and have a special session to cover Monday’s material
Presuming one of the remaining days is a review-like day, cancel it to fit in the rest of the days. The review day will then be rescheduled as a special session at a time that the vast majority of students can make (perhaps consulted via a survey). - Cancel the test and integrate into the final
This presumes there is a final. Some students may balk at this, and since it would involve the modification of the syllabus may require approval of higher ups or be subject to other university rules.
Some universities may have more codified policies that explicitly add on extra days, in which case you should modify the schedule in accordance with that policy. No doubt that a department head or dean would remind you of such a policy in advance (our provost did, which is to say, we were encouraged to hold virtual classes, but were reminded that we were free to handle the situation — including rescheduling classes outside of normal hours — in the ways that best fit our courses)
| This is a college level issue. The school should come up with a plan for how such a problem should be handled. It seems absurd to ask each individual professor to come up with a specific plan for his/her own students. – Dan Romik 2 hours ago | ||
| @DanRomik This should be an upvotable answer. In fact, the answer. – Captain Emacs 2 hours ago | ||
@CaptainEmacs okay, posted as an answer as per your suggestion. – Dan Romik 2 hours ago |
| Indeed, but/and (here in Minnesota, where snow and ice are common), my own institution is historically negligent in planning for such things… instead declaring that it's just the usual, and that it is "against the rules" for instructors to cancel class just because there's a blizzard, for example. So I've resorted to announcing (in person or in email) "following the rules, class will not be cancelled, but the material will be repeated in its entirety the subsequent class time …" That is, because the central admins don't necessarily have to cope with the fallout, they may choose delusion… – paul garrett 2 hours ago | ||
| It's only a college level issue at places with college level plans in place. That doesn't really help as an answer for those places that give professors autonomy (which isn't absurd — I know my class and its needs better than any administrator) – guifa 1 hour ago |
| I am mildly, and happily, surprised to hear of an administration that grants autonomous decision-making to individual faculty… On the other hand, then I guess they won't have to field any complaints, and it'll be on faculty members' heads. – paul garrett 2 hours ago |
