University Gives Students Shaft During Jubilee Week

The fury of Jubilee Week is now safely behind us. The week-long activities were a major success and a tribute to the spirit of this institution. After years of planning and preparation it is time to breath a big sigh of relief.

However, there was one incy-bitsy-tiny mistake the administration and faculty made: they screwed over their own students.

Jubilee Week was great in a lot of ways — great performers, activities and visits from spiritual giants like Thomas Monson and Robert D. Hales. This event was fifty years in coming and we can only begin to guess at the man-hours and millions of dollars it took to make it happen.

Before I go on, I need you to understand that I mean every word of that. I don’t want to diminish our accomplishments with needless whining. However, it needs to be said the administration and faculty should have planned midterms out better, and because they didn’t, students went through more aggravation than what we should have been put through.

I dragged myself to a packed testing center on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and even Saturday to get through my own midterms. For every test, I put at least (the key words here being “at least”) four hours of studying before taking it — on top of working increased hours every night. I’d like to think of myself as a solid student, with an honest work ethic, so I know most of my fellow classmates put even more work into studying.

And yes, in the icy confines of the digitally-monitored-concentration-camp known as the Testing Center, I got a good look at my fellow student’s faces.

To say these were stressed out doesn’t really do them justice. These were people pushed beyond their limit. These people were taking tests on days they were promised not to have to deal with class. These were Jubilee-related volunteers and workers who were way over the 19 hours they could clock in and get paid for.

Yet on days we should have been focusing on our respective job responsibilities and the Jubilee, we were torn between attending once-in-a-lifetime activities and endless amounts of studying and test taking.

If I were a more studious journalist I would have made several calls around to get to the real story here and craft a carefully balanced news article where you, the reader, could make an informed decision on what went wrong — but like a lot of people this week I’m over hours.

Instead, all I have is petty politics I’ve heard second hand from reliable sources: On one hand, the university administration urged teachers to do everything in their power to make sure students could attend the various Jubilee activities and didn’t set strict rules on what teachers could do during Jubilee and what they couldn’t. Teachers, on the other hand, have schedules and lesson plans that must be kept.

The rest is history.

Whether midterms should have been planned around Jubilee week in the first place (or vice versa), isn’t the real issue here.

The administration and faculty were obviously not in agreement on how academic workloads should have been structured for students during this special period. As students, we thought having Thursday and Friday off would alleviate our schedules enough to handle all that was expected of us while focusing in on the important events going on.

This is a pathetic and hypocritical lapse that could have been handled by better planning — instead of shifting hours around at the Testing Center.

July 12th, 2005 in Commentary |