Courtesy of pxhere
The end of spring semester means a ramping of academic responsibilities and extracurricular involvements at the same time. Students juggle classes, assignments, sports practices, rehearsals, work, and a variety of other clubs and engagements. Meanwhile, first-years are tackling finals week for the first time, sophomores are preparing to study abroad, juniors are applying for critical summer internships, and seniors are finishing up and presenting their theses. Many colleges accommodate the piling up of responsibilities at the end of the semester by scheduling a reading period, a week or so directly preceding finals, where students can focus on studying and writing papers without the lost time spent in classes.
At Hamilton, we have a very brief reading period — only two days: May 8th and 9th.
I decided to see what reading periods for the spring 2018 semester looked like across the eleven NESCAC colleges to see how Hamilton measured up. Trinity College takes the cake for the longest reading period with a whopping six days and Wesleyan University follows close behind with five. Amherst, Bowdoin, Colby, and Williams Colleges all have four day reading periods, while Tufts University, Bates and Middlebury Colleges have three days. Connecticut and Hamilton Colleges come out on the bottom with two days each. This works out to a mean average of 3.6 days per school with a median and mode average of four days. Essentially, nearly a full reading week.
Since the academic calendars of the NESCAC schools tend to align fairly well for sports purposes, I decided to look at the eight Ivy League Schools to see how they compared with the NESCAC. They were even more varied that the NESCAC schools. Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and Cornell University had one, two, three, and four days respectively. Harvard and Yale Universities both had seven days. Princeton University nears the top with an over a week long reading period, nine days, and Brown University blows everybody else out of the water with a whopping twelve day reading period. These schools average out to a mean of 5.6, a median of 5.5 days, and a mode of seven reading days; overall, a longer average period than Hamilton.
I also wanted to examine how universities that are not all bound by athletic leagues would measure up to one another, so I found the average reading period for World Atlas’s list of the ten largest public universities in the United States. University of Central Florida, Ohio State University, Florida International University, and Indiana University all have one reading day each. Texas A&M University, University of Florida, Arizona State University, and University of Minnesota each have two days. And University of Texas at Austin and Michigan State University each have three. That averages out to a median of 1.8, a mode of 1.2, and a median of two.
The large state schools have the lowest mean reading period, Hamilton has the middle average, and the Ivys the highest, with some variation within each group. It is evident that, variation accounted for, different groups of schools have different attitudes towards the necessity of lengthy reading periods and many schools get by on far less than a full week. Even so, Hamilton does come out on the low end of the NESCAC schools.
Clearly, the administration does not feel that a full reading week is necessary. There are a variety of ways to justify this decision. Having a shorter reading week was probably a contributing factor in Hamilton’s two-week spring break instead of the single week many other schools have. Hamilton classes also end earlier in May than some other schools and clipping reading week could have made this possible as well. However, having such a short reading week is not popular with everybody. Nearly all students have final papers, projects, and tests that reading week would allow them uninterrupted time to finish. Others have extracurricular commitments that impede their studying which would (presumably) have ended by reading week, giving them a much needed break
Perhaps the largest issue with the two-day reading period is that some people truly only have two days while others may have three or four if their finals do not start until late into finals week. I think Hamilton students would benefit from an additional reading day to prepare for finals so they can prepare thoroughly at a rigorous but manageable pace.
