The recently released first semester exam timetable has sparked controversy after Religious Studies students noticed that none of their papers would escape a 6:30pm start time, constituting 72% of the exams in that time slot overall. To say they’re “miffed” would be an understatement.
Three papers within the Theology department have 6:30pm starts. The other three papers with 6:30pm exams are two 700-level distance papers based in Christchurch, and a 200-level paper on human sexuality. This staggering coincidence led students to question the motives of the University's timetables team, with one student positing, “Does the University hate religion?”
Well, no. The University’s Director of Student Experience, Jo Gibson, told Critic Te Ārohi that, “RELS papers are predominantly distance-taught papers with an on-campus cohort.” To this degree, she argued that it meant “exams have to be scheduled either on a Wednesday evening or Saturday morning to cater for the large number of students likely to be working full-time.” Gibson also suggested that paper size could be a key determinant in some cases: “The number of students in a paper will determine room allocation, which in turn can determine timing.”
The University’s proposal that Religious Studies students are predominantly full-time grinders with the subject as their side-hustle was questioned by several students within the department. Stroking her chin, one Religious Studies student, Rata, told Critic Te Ārohi that the timetabling coincidence “definitely is suspicious.”
Head of the Otago Uni Religious Studies programme, Ben Schonthal, was also confused by the coincidence, diplomatically stating, “I would hate to think there is any convention that would disadvantage our students.”
Students also complained about the spacings of exams, with several of the more time-intensive subjects being rather close together. BSci student Andrew said, “It's sort of bad for cramming, especially when you have them the day after the other.” Others, whose courses are more multidisciplinary, are left out to dry in terms of their course spacings, creating “single weeks from Hell.” One notable example is the combination of Science and Arts, BASci student Nevan told Critic. On the other hand though, some students looked for the silver-lining, such as second-year Allistair, who said, “I don't like it for the reason that my exams get super clumped together, but also know that it helps coordinate exams to avoid schedule conflicts.”
Critic is told by Gibson that these conflicts are something that the Timetables team work very hard to avoid "within policy, regulations and available rooms [...] For the examinations scheduling the team are only able to avoid the majority of clashes generated with manual intervention, and we also look at students with more than one examination in a day, and students with exams on consecutive days. Unfortunately it is not always possible to remove all such occurrences and deliver a timetable that achieves this for every student when we are trying to balance the needs across ~25,000 examination sitting for close to 10,000 students with Semester 1 final examinations."