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It has been several weeks since the end of the fall semester at the University of Regina, but there are still about 190 students with a class hanging over their heads.
On Dec. 21, the university’s online system crashed, causing problems for thousands of students trying to take final exams that day. Thanks to the pandemic, nearly every class in the fall semester has been delivered online, including the finals.
Some of the finals were just delayed that day, while others were rescheduled later in the week. Only one class, Kinesiology 275: Introduction to Nutrition, was rescheduled for two weeks later, to just before the winter semester is set to start.
It’s a development pre-med student Samuel Tremblay is unhappy about. He was in the class and said he was all set to take the exam on the appointed day until the system crashed.
Now, he said students taking that class have the stress of the final hanging over their heads for the entire winter break, instead of being able to relax and regroup before the next semester. He believes it is having or will have an effect on the students’ mental health.
“Personally, I haven’t been able to feel relaxed because I’m still studying right now. I still have to study for this huge exam for the entire course when we’re supposed to be relaxing,” said Tremblay.
In an online survey of the students in the class sent out by Tremblay, the vast majority of those who responded said the university’s decision wasn’t fair, that it was causing them stress, and they believe it will lead to increased “burnout” in the winter semester.
Tremblay said the entire online semester has had hardship, especially when writing exams. He said the programs and extra software, like the proctoring software, required to take courses and tests can put a lot of strain on students’ computers.
He mentioned a student in his class whose computer crashed while taking an exam earlier in the semester and was given a zero when it was subsequently submitted a few minutes late. Tremblay said he didn’t know whether that situation had been resolved.
“The university is holding their students entirely responsible for their own internet connection, their own hardware at home. And yet the university has had this hardware issue that I think was extremely preventable,” said Tremblay.
Tremblay said the program crashed for the nutrition class while students were taking a test earlier in the semester, so the university should have known this could be an issue during finals and should have done something to prevent it.
Tremblay also believes the university isn’t, technically, allowed to move the exam date – he contends the Undergraduate Calendar, the document laying out rules and regulations for undergraduate students and classes, doesn’t allow it.
He’s talking about a line under Exam Scheduling in the 2020-21 document that reads, “Exam locations are added to the web course schedule towards the end of the term. Once a final exam date and time have been published, they cannot be changed without the written consent of all students in the course, and the approval of the instructor’s dean.”
In an email to the students, the associate dean of the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies pointed to a later portion of the calendar which talks about the “unexpected delay in delivery of a course.” The university argues the program crashing is an unexpected delay.
Tremblay disagrees and said it raises some distrust for him in the university.
“What else in the undergraduate calendar can now be changed? What other rights that students have can now be taken away because of COVID?” asked Tremblay.
Tremblay thinks the university should make the final for the class optional, allowing those students who want to raise their grades with the test to do so but allowing other students to take the weight off their shoulders.
The university has shortened the exam from three hours to two and has offered students three different dates and times to take it in the week before the winter semester is about to begin. After a round of complaints from students, the dean of the faculty also offered to let students defer the exam to the end of January instead.
Tremblay said that offer is the opposite of what the students want.
“It really shows how he doesn’t understand what we’re talking about. Deferring the exam is pushing it further,” Tremblay said. “We didn’t want it postponed at all.”
When the program crashed, more than 2,000 students were trying to write exams at the same time, according to Paul Dederick, associate director of communications and public relations with the university.
“The system was just unable to manage it and we ran into a couple of technical glitches which caused intermittent outages which meant that some exams were affected, but many weren’t and many went off just fine,” said Dederick.
Dederick said that large number of students trying to take a test all at once hadn’t really happened before.
“This is the first fully online set of final exams that we have had to manage going remotely, so yes, it was still a new thing for us and there are still some things we are working out,” explained Dederick.
Other classes were able to reschedule their finals that week, but Dederick said because the nutrition class is so large, there were too many conflicts, and moving it further away was the best choice.
“We appreciate their frustration and we understand it, and we do apologize for it but it was really the only solution that would make sense,” said Dederick.
Dederick wasn’t able to say whether the faculty had considered removing the final from the course altogether, noting that any such decision would have to be made at the instructor and associate dean level.
When it comes to the students’ mental health, Dederick said, during the semester, the school has often been letting students know about the mental health supports available in the school, including the mental wellness hub that was launched this year.
Dederick said the school understands that this is difficult and frustrating for students.
“It’s not ideal but it’s the situation we find ourselves in,” said Dederick.