Convincing Hopkins students to sacrifice their four-day weekends for a more traditional five-week class spread does not seem like the easiest task. The new schedule for the spring 2008 semester is a transition from the current Monday through Wednesday schedule to the revised Monday/Wednesday/Friday set up.
Bill Conley, dean of enrollment and academic services was involved in the scheduling transition from the onset. "The issue has been on minds for a long time because the current Hopkins schedule was never a designated design, it just evolved." In that respect, Hopkins has always been an outlier within its peer group of universities, but the issue was only put into focus after 2003's Q report.
"Thirty proposed actions were relayed in detailed report from surveys of students, parents and administrators from a series of commissions and focus groups. One of the proposals was to review the academic schedule due to the sense of stress in current schedule," Conley said.
Another reason for the change is the fact that Peabody, the Public Health School and cross-registered schools like Goucher College are on more traditional schedules, making it difficult for students to coordinate classes.
According to Dean Falk of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, "In the view of the ongoing implementation of the?new student information systems, it was decided that spring 2008 was?the earliest that it would be feasible to move to the new schedule."
"The overarching change is that the current schedule is very imbalanced, where the bulk of the work is compressed into a small portion of the week and Thursdays and Fridays are relatively light," Conley said.
However, the decision to change the schedules was not based on a consensus. Convey said, "Some professors will argue that three classes in a row is more useful, some not. The bottom line is that the schedule as it is does reflect a notion that students suffered a bit from binge learning. Courses are highly compressed and continue to raise concerns about how students pace themselves between periods of intense stress and relaxation."
"During the planning stages, we ran scenarios of the typical student's schedule under the current system against that of a student's schedule under the new one to see if, in fact, there would be unexpected conflicts. We found that spreading out allowed more flexibility to select courses. Long-standing, even when hear[ing] from alums, they comment on the difficulty they had in taking preferred classes, either because of degree restrictions or large required courses in the sciences."
One important aspect of the revised schedule is plotting out science courses so they do not conflict. "Departments cannot schedule more than 50 percent of classes between 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., which is called 'primetime' ... With additional days in the schedule, 'primetime' will be less compressed, and therefore more students will be able to take the classes they want to take."
One particular feature of the new schedule change is the extension of Writing Seminars class times. According to the chair of the Writing Seminars department, Dave Smith, "Our graduate courses are currently offered in 150-minute blocks so no change is required. The undergraduate courses have been historically offered in 100-minute blocks, or what we refer to as two-hour blocks. I am not personally teaching an undergraduate class until spring 2009. When I do teach it, I will be provided more opportunities to have the students read and discuss pertinent models in their study. For example, if we are studying metaphor, I will be able to look both more deeply at what metaphor is and how it best works and also to look at more diverse examples."
Students aware of the changes have diverse opinions on this issue. Junior BME major Adam Canver said, "Hopkins will largely benefit from the new system. First, the new system is similar to most other comparable schools (from my limited understanding), it better balances the week, takes a lot of stress off the weekend and the first few days of the week when most assignments are due."
Freshman mathematics major Shane Steinart-Thelkeld echoed the sentiment: "It seemed like a good change, but that was mainly since almost all other schools have a schedule resembling the new one. The change has its pros/cons. This semester, I had a lot of conflicts when trying to plan my schedule because fewer classes seemed to have Thursday-Friday lectures. Of course, the way it is now, my Thursdays and Fridays are very easy compared to Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, which makes for a nice pre-weekend break."
A more practical effect of the new schedule addresses the problem of unused resources and classroom availability in the current schedule. Conley said, "We think there may be some unforeseen conflicts, but to date, all departments have submitted course offerings for spring and those have been placed in the schedule ... No system is perfect, but we'll want to see how the spring works, and there will be some things that we will learn about the course distribution and some fine tuning for the following fall semester. But we are pretty confident in the utilization of classrooms and a more reasonable distribution of students as the best course of action for Hopkins."
