One semester after the new academic calendar changes went into effect — cutting three to four days of instruction — UW-Madison professors have had to make adjustments to cope with the new schedule.
According to a report from 2016, the changes were the first revisions to UW-Madison’s academic calendar in decades. In April, UW-Madison announced the tweaks, including:
- 69 days of instruction over the course of 15 weeks
- All fall semesters will start on a Wednesday
- All spring semesters will start on a Tuesday
The university highlighted several positives to the new calendar, such as easing the difficulty of planning for faculty and staff by adding regular semester lengths and consistent start days.
Additionally, the university said the changes will keep students from having conflicts between final exams and their commencement ceremonies, offer more time for grade processing, and will align the university with its peer institutions.
But Doug McLeod, professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, said that in his conversations with colleagues, many didn’t notice that the fall semester had fewer days and the change “kinda took them by surprise.”
“People were talking to me and saying ‘You know, it seems like the semester went by more quickly. We didn’t have time to get stuff done. It seemed like a rush at the end.’ I think a lot of those people who were expressing [that] didn’t realize, yeah, it was actually a week shorter,” McLeod said. “So I don’t think there was a lot of publicity given to faculty members — that your classes are losing a week or your syllabi are going to have to take that into account.”
Despite a cut in the number of days, Jon Pevehouse, a professor of international relations and political methodology, said it wasn’t hard to compress course material into the shorter semester.
“I’ll be blunt - our semesters are too long,” Pevehouse said. “If you look across other top institutions in my field, we have long semesters. Length has nothing to do with instruction — if it did, summer school would not exist. It’s about what you do in the time. It does force you to think about what you really need to get across.”
But others felt that it was tricky to replan for the lower number of days. Amos Bitzan, an assistant professor of history, said that while he would be on board with the calendar changes if they solve the larger issues, he did have to cut days that would have been otherwise dedicated to students’ paper preparation.
“The semester did feel slightly more compressed and I ended up having to reshuffle my syllabi more than I anticipated,” Bitzan said. “I was also concerned that students would have less time to complete their final assignments, but that worked out okay.”
In terms of how the changes will affect student performance, McLeod said it’s not as easy to see the long-term effects and added he didn’t have “a strong feeling” about what the changes could mean down the road. However, he said he expected to encounter short-term issues.
“Not only do we have to make adjustments in our syllabus and all that, but we have to make adjustments in our lecture materials. [I have to] go through lecture to lecture and decide what gets cut out. We have to make adjustments in our exams. ‘Oh, I can’t ask a question like that on my exam because we might not have time to cover that,’ McLeod said. “There are short-term kind of domino effects like any changes to policy that are hard to anticipate. That was kind of a headache.”
