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<p>My guess is that the midterm exam schedule was posted WELL in advance of the actual exam week…and finals will be as well. My kids both had exams on Friday nights…and both had exams on Saturday MORNING (which I think is WORSE than Friday night).</p>
<p>I would think that if they have an exam scheduled for a Friday night that exam should be their “significant plan” for that evening…with plans to go out afterward.</p>
<p>Certainly Jewish students (and any other with Sabbath conflicts of any kind) would have made arrangements when the syllabus was published, or can make arrangements now to handle that conflict.</p>
<p>If an exception were not made for this type of reason… now <em>that</em> would be outrageous in my book.</p>
<p>Conflict with Greek week… not so much.</p>
<p>I’m an oldtimer, but back in the day would have been pretty ticked off by having to take a test on Friday night. Especially during midterms, I remember being sooooo exhausted by the time Friday night rolled around.</p>
<p>And don’t performances (plays, concerts, etc), dorm formals and other dorm events, some Greek events, and athletic events start well before 10 o’clock?</p>
<p>At my undergrad school we had classes called ‘minis.’ They were half a semester long, but contained a full semester’s worth of material. The final took place on the first day of mid-semester break; this was typically a Friday. What did this mean? If you didn’t have a mini you had Friday off and the weekend started on Thursday. If you did have a final (in my case, twice at 8:30 AM) you had the entire dorm partying until 4 AM while you tried to study and go to bed early.</p>
<p>In summary, tell him to suck it up.</p>
<p>I am currently a student at Northwestern. As a freshman engineer, I have had multiple evening exams. They have been for Chem 101, Multivariable Calculus, and Engineering Analysis(freshman engineering sequence). It is definitely NOT out of the ordinary for us to have evening exams.</p>
<p>thumper, were those midterms or finals on Friday night and Saturday morning? During finals period, there wouldn’t be much else going on on campus.</p>
<p>S1s college has a specific exam schedule that does not follow “normal” classes. He often reports that the profs ask the kids if they want to take the exams at night or earlier if the classes are at the tail end of the exam schedule. I’m sure the profs want to get onto the weekend just as much as the kids and probably hate morning as much as the kids. I really don’t care “when” they take exams, I’ve never got the impression there was “Thursday” parties at either of my son’s colleges. I’m sure some kids do, but mine generally have a class or two or three on Friday.</p>
<p>SixthD - I know schools have evening exams these days (I guess because the profs think that students will cheat otherwise, or they’re too lazy to make up more than one exam. how did they manage it back in the old days, when exams were always given during class time?) But having them on FRIDAY night just doesn’t seem quite right.</p>
<p>Outraged? Seems a bit strong. Normally, syllabi, provided at the start of the semester, indicate midterm dates, so one would know well in advance and can plan accordingly. </p>
<p>IMHO, a kid who can’t handle working on an occasional pre-specified “weekend” (however defined) isn’t going to cope very well in either graduate school or the world of work. Wahhh…</p>
<p>Great if they plan to be an hourly employee and not a professional (though then it makes me question why their parents are footing the bill on NU tuition or whether they take their education seriously enough for a place like NU).</p>
<p>The OP is really a kid not a parent.</p>
<p>Most evening exams are at 6 or 7, at least from my experiences. That doesn’t even come close to cutting into weekend time.</p>
<p>Sixth Declension, do your exams END by 6 or 7, or do they go until something like 8,9 or 10? Do you know about them at the very beginning of the term?</p>
<p>Yeah, the dates and times are listed in the syllabus that you get at the beginning of the class. In one case, an engineering and math midterm conflicted, so the times were changed to be one after another on the same day, with an hour break. That day, they went til ten. Usually not after 8 though.</p>
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<p>For one kid it was finals…for the other it was midterms or finals (but to be fair…it was not at an alternate time…Friday evening was when this class MET).</p>
<p>At MD we do have evening exams, and Sat. morning exams. I am not sure if there are Fri. evening exams or not. Personally I’d prefer a Fri. evening exam to a morning exam of any variety. </p>
<p>But really…really?? SO WHAT. College kids are generally not professionals who have work 8am-5pm every day (in which they have to wake up at 6:30am to get to the office in time and don’t get home until 6pm). </p>
<p>Sometimes their classes start at noon. Sometimes their day ends at 10am. Yes they have “Extracurriculars” taking up significant parts of their day, but that is, ya know, extracurriculars. Kinda for funsies. </p>
<p>So my point is that for college kids the “off time from the office” doesn’t start at Fri. and end on Sunday night. Colege schedules are extremely flexible. </p>
<p>A professional might be upset if he/she is forced to effectively work from 6:30am-6pm in an office every day and then is asked to come back to said office until 10pm Fri night. </p>
<p>But a STUDENT needs to frickin’ suck it up. Their life is pretty sweet. A missed Greek event (OH THE HORROR) or something equally frivolous is no excuse to be outraged when I’m sure the student was hanging out with friends and doing fairly unstressful work at various other points in the week.</p>
<p>And that professional that actually could use the Friday night at home with kids and family, are they gonna get angry about an occasional request to attend a function on Fri. evening? Nope, most people expect that is a possibility.</p>
<p>Both kids’ colleges have weekend finals scheduled, including Sundays. Thus, kinda hard to feel much sympathy for a Friday night exam. Rising to the level of “outrage”???</p>
<p>At my children’s colleges, a lot of students participate in plays, a cappella groups, concerts and the like. It seems like having a test on Friday night could present a significant conflict. Aren’t things like basketball games & swim meets also held at such times?</p>
<p>Such things (at least the non-athletic events) wouldn’t be scheduled during FINALS periods, but would likely conflict w/ a Friday night midterm being held for a daytime class.</p>
<p>As a one-time TA, I remember the rationale for evening exams.</p>
<p>Basically, professors want to give everyone the same exam. If there’s more than one version of the exam, there will be complaints later on that the versions differed in difficulty. Also, it takes more work to design two or three equivalent exams rather than one.</p>
<p>But to give just one exam , you need a bigger room than the one you use for lectures. This is because you need to separate the students so they can’t see each other’s papers. Your best chance of being able to reserve a big room is in the evening.</p>
<p>And to give just one exam in a class that is separated into multiple sections that meet at different times, you need a REALLY big room. You also need a single time in which to give the exam to everyone. Your best chance of being able to get that big room and to find a time that doesn’t conflict with your students’ other classes is in the evening.</p>
<p>Friday evening, though, seems really weird at a school like Northwestern, which has a substantial Jewish population. The professor would have to write an alternate exam for the kids with religious excuses, who would be taking the exam on a different day. This sort of negates the value of evening exams, from the professor’s point of view.</p>
<p>I have proctored exams in rooms so big that I had to give the students instructions using a bullhorn. The lectures were not held in those huge rooms.</p>
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<p>Personally, I’d be horrified if I had to take an exam on a Friday night, or any time after 4pm, but I go to sleep between 9-10pm and wake at 5:30am every morning.</p>
<p>Heck, I’d rather take an exam at 4am in the morning than take one at 4pm on any given day. But that’s my biological clock.</p>
<p>But your post prompted me to check DS’s schedule. </p>
<p>Either he is a vampire or his biological clock is off by mine by about 6-7 hours. Now I know why I favored the swing shift when I was his age.</p>
<p>Thanks for the post. I mean it.</p>
<p>Just had dinner with my old college roommate and her college freshman s. He’s got his advising material and is setting up spring semester. He could take on of three physics labs–one is on Wednesday night, another on Friday night, and the third on Saturday morning. So, no, I guess a Friday night exam isn’t all that surprising.</p>
<p>FWIW, as college students, my friends and I never left to go out before 10 on a Friday.</p>
<p>I have a copy of Tufts’ exam schedule in front of me and there are exams on Friday night from 7-9 pm. </p>
<p>S2 has an evening recitation section, too. Makes sense to use the building for more than just classes from 9-3.</p>