Next week, most of you will be away enjoying your time back home during what the University calls “reading week.” Reading week (known as revision week in some Commonwealth countries) was instituted to give students a break in the middle of their academic year to help ease the academic workload. It is meant to aid with the students’ preparation for exams. However, reading week, as implemented in its present form, can be more of a bane than a boon, especially in the Faculty of Engineering.
As it stands, reading week normally follows after a week of midterms. Although it initially started as a week-long break during the term to allow students to prepare for the upcoming midterm exams, it has morphed into a week crammed with homework to compensate for the lack of assignments and classes during what most engineers call “Hell Week.” The full week of vacation for reading week was instituted by the Faculty of Engineering in late November 2005. A vast majority of engineering students spend their reading weeks with family. Trying to juggle the workload assigned by professors along with family commitments can be very hard. Unlike most students in other faculties and, for that matter, other universities, most Waterloo engineering students do not fly to warm, exotic places. However, this policy is a little bit flawed owing to the fact that only the winter terms have this period off. Other terms do not have similar periods of rest in the middle of the term, making it unfair to engineers who aren’t in school during the winter terms. As a nanotechnology engineer, we only have 2 winter terms as opposed to the obligatory 3. Hence, we don’t receive the same period off as the other students in the Faculty of Engineering.
The increased workload can also create problems on the performance of some students. Not all students are very good at managing their free time effectively. As mentioned earlier, reading week is a time in which students are expected to do their own time and work on all the assigned extra homework. Unfortunately, there are many students who think that reading week is a time for a well-deserved break from studying and doing anything that involves school. As a result, these students end up falling behind on their coursework, making the rest of the term much harder as they now have to catch-up on an entire week’s worth of assignments and readings on top of whatever gets assigned when school starts up again. Instead of its intended purpose of helping students catch-up with their courses, students instead end up falling behind.
The addition of reading week introduces an unnecessary delay to the end of the term. As a university that boasts its co-op programs, there are many students who have to go to work in the very beginning of May right after exams. This leaves only a week or so of a break after the stressful exams to move out from Waterloo and to move into where their co-op jobs are, leaving little time to spend with family and friends back home or, in my case, just simply unwinding after the exams. If reading week was to be removed, the entire school term’s schedule would be shifted back by one week, including the end of the exam period. This would allow for a longer break in between the school and work terms, giving us more time to cool-down after the very stressful exam season.
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