To the editors:

For as long as I can remember, exams at SLUH have been a critical part of the curriculum— administered every quarter with two to five days dedicated entirely to reviewing the material the exam would cover and shoring up subjects that proved to have been a struggle in the past several weeks. Exams are even more prevalent at SLUH—we are one of the only schools to give quarterly exams as opposed to strictly semester ones. They’re incredibly stressful and preparing for them is exhausting and tedious, but in an ideal world they present a final hurdle for students after the first quarter and before Christmas and spring break. Because of this, the implementation of exams this year, in these circumstances, doesn’t seem to be in the best interests of the students. 

Students have been alternating between classrooms and their bedroom desk for the better part of 6 months, being expected to have 2 methods of learning and informational intake that are effective enough to be transitioned from home to classroom, and vice versa. You will be hard pressed to find one student, parent, or faculty member who will say that the current method of schooling, despite SLUH’s admirable efforts to bring us as close to “normal” as possible, has been anywhere near as conducive to their education as standard schooling that we experienced pre-Covid. 

So why are we having regular exams? Why are we giving an invaluable and ungovernable advantage to students who are entirely online for what are the most important grades of the semester, and for some the entire school year? We have been assigned all semester, at least in my own circumstances, to open-note and online exams, in addition to an exam-less first quarter. To me, it doesn’t make sense to implement a closed-note, paper exam when we’ve been acclimated to the opposite. If the problem lies within academic honesty, why have we taken open-note tests at all during the school year, let alone on the lion’s share of assessments? If the objective is to test what we’ve actually internalized over the semester, why aren’t the notes that we curated allowed? 

The proposed exam week will see more than a cohort’s worth of students attend to take their exams despite us still being in hybrid scheduling. There are many questions I have with the decision to pursue these types of tests, and it seems completely logical to me to continue with open-note testing to conclude the semester we had, and then continue with regular testing once we open up full-time again, if that’s what the administration deems appropriate. I just don’t think it’s entirely fair to students, especially hybrid ones, to encourage open-note tests over the course of the semester and switch to normal ones at the very end. 

Is SLUH trying to handicap their students? Of course not. Like I said earlier, exams have been and will continue to be an integral aspect of a SLUH education, and I don’t expect that to change. All I’m asking for is a level playing field between online students and hybrid students, and an exam system that accurately reflects what students have gone through during this Covid-impacted school year. 

Charlie Albus, ’21