Word on the street is that Capital will be altering the undergraduate academic calendar pending approval.
Jens Hemmingsen, Associate Provost of Accreditation and Analytics, Academic Affairs, speaks out on the potential changes.
Capital started meeting to make changes once the concerns were brought about. This group included staff such as residence life staff members and those of the provost office, including Hemmingsen.
Why is the schedule changing? Hemmingsen explains that the current calendar has caused issues, such as fall semester classes ending before Thanksgiving such as the current year. He also says that the main, overarching goal is to improve student success and learning.
Under the overarching goal of student success and learning, there are many others. They want to move the start of school to a later date, so that the end date will be later in order to allow for a week of classes after Thanksgiving before finals. This also would allow for students to attend the end of the semester student events such as the Christmas concert. In addition, if school were to start later, there would be less hot days in August to account for, and make students more comfortable.
Administration wants to start classes on a Wednesday, so that students can take Monday and Tuesday to make final schedule changes and get their affairs in order before class.
Another change would be with the breaks. Spring break would be a week later, so instead of having it at the end of February, it would be the first week of March. As far as fall break goes, there are no decisions made yet. An idea would be to have a two day fall break instead of one, but that extra day would have to be made up somewhere else in the calendar year.
Lastly, towards the end of the year, they would want to prolong Easter Break so that students have more time to spend with their families. Instead of having break Thursday through Sunday, it would be Thursday through Monday, with classes starting back on Tuesday.
The way they started to propose changes was by looking at what has worked in the past, and what hasn’t. The group looked at other academic calendars from previous years at Capital, along with those of other universities, to gather suggestions that people may be interested in. They also took into consideration each other’s proposals.
Thus far, they have proposed their ideas to student government along with student leadership and development. The feedback they were looking for was whether or not certain changes should be made. Nothing has been approved yet. The first year that any changes would be made is the fall of 2020.
Other potential changes in the future can possibly include graduate and summer calendars.
For the current academic calendar, click here.
