At Anglia, particularly at Cambridge, we face similar problems to
Warwick, with students moving very freely between Schools on the
modular scheme. They do, too, at Chelmsford but rather less because of
the more vocational nature of the provision. However, Chelmsford has a
much higher proportion of part time students who tend to "drive" the
examination days, as they prefer to attend for exams on the day that
they normally attend for lectures. We do not make any commitment to
students interms of the number of exams they have in one day. We will
try to accommodate Schools' request to schedule exams on the days that
they deem best for their students ans, occasionally, we have shifted
the day of an exam when the load had been felt onerous for a particular
cohort. Two exams in one day, as long as there was sufficient break to
allow for refreshments etc. would not be regarded as onerous.
Sue Sings
On Thu, 29 Apr 1999 11:18:32 +0000 (GMT) Joe Taylor
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> We seem to be getting more students complaining about having 2
> exams on one day during the main summer exam period (although
> I don't believe the numbers in this position are significantly greater
> than in previous years). Do other institutions give their students any
> commitments about examination load/pacing?
>
> Warwick's degree courses give students a very high degree of
> option choice, across departments and faculties as well as within
> departments (especially in the final year of undergraduate courses).
> This of course results in extensive clash lists for a lot of papers (it
> is not unusual for some larger papers to accumulate 80+ potential
> clashes with other papers). The 4 week June exam period
> incorporates papers examining 1160 modules and a total of 43,450
> candidate places. Further restrictions on scheduling are of course
> finite room capacity and the requirement to conduct final and first-
> year exams earlier in the period than intermediate-year papers.
> All this means that is logistically impossible to produce a timetable
> which gives no student more than one exam on one day. The best
> general constraint that we can build into it is that no-one gets more
> than 3 papers over 2 days (and occasionally this has to be
> overruled). We also try- as far as possible, anyhow- to avoid
> compulsory core courses being placed in adjacent slots.
>
> I'd be grateful to know how other colleagues who have to cope with
> similar data complexity/course structures see this issue.
>
> Joe Taylor
> Academic Office
> University of Warwick
> Coventry
> CV4 7AL
>
----------------------
Susan Sings
Anglia Polytechnic University
@anglia.ac.uk
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