By Danil Buzhor, Senior Reporter
At this point in the semester most students’ schedule effectively collapses. This is not an emotional crisis, but rather a logistical one. The structure of the academic calendar is designed to guarantee a bottleneck of work right about now, and solutions like Reading Week don't resolve the problem.
In concept, Reading Week sounds great: a break in the semester to catch up on reading and rest. In reality, it functions differently. Because classes are paused, many professors view this as "free time" for students. They then assign midterms or major papers due immediately after the break.
Instead of spending time resting, students prepare for the pile of assignments and other deadlines that await them once they get back. It is not a week of recharge but a deferral of stress. We are not recovering; we are just banking hours for the projects due two weeks later.
The main problem isn't the difficulty of the work - it’s the clustering. There seems to be zero coordination between departments regarding major deadlines. At first it seems to be just good or bad luck, and yet it is consistently true that a Computer Science project, a Math midterm, and a Humanities essay will all fall on the same Thursday in late November.
When multiple major tasks are due within a window of 72 hours, the goal shifts from "doing good work" to "submitting something that exists." Quality suffers. Students aren't trying to demonstrate what they learned. The end of the semester turns into an exercise in time management rather than academic achievement.
By this point in the term, everyone is operating on diminishing returns. Focus is lower, patience is thinner, and the material is getting harder. The current schedule ignores this reality. It backloads the heaviest weight of the semester onto the time of year when productivity naturally dips.
The solution is not necessarily less work, just better spacing. If what the university wants to do is test what we really know, spreading the load out - or imposing policies against deadline clustering - would produce better grades and better retention.