How did this experiment come about?
‘The initiative came from De Jonge Akademie a few years ago. With support from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, institutions were given the opportunity to experiment with what was known as a smarter academic year. My project focused on first-year students within my own programme (Advanced Technology, of which Wormeester is programme director, ed.) and Electrical Engineering. We share the mathematics courses, so we could approach this in a coordinated way. Other programmes at UT also got to work on their own proposals.’
What exactly did you make ‘smarter’ about your academic year?
‘It immediately started with the minister’s most important condition: the number of teaching hours could not be reduced. I could perhaps have turned the entire curriculum upside down, but I chose something else. For me, it was about the opportunity we still gave students to retake an exam for a third attempt within the same year. That third attempt is often the proverbial last resort. In practice, we saw that of the ten students who took up the opportunity, only one eventually passed. Meanwhile, a lecturer still has to prepare a new exam, supervise it, and mark it. And all of that for that one successful student in the course…’
So, get rid of the third attempt?
‘Exactly. At the same time, we wanted to make the resit, the second attempt, more successful. There was certainly room for improvement there, too. Traditionally, the resit was scheduled in week ten and often had to compete with the project for priority. It is also stressful for lecturers. Let’s do a quick calculation: suppose you have eighty exams to mark and spend half an hour on each one, then you have already lost a full working week. Sometimes the resit comes around so quickly that a lecturer has only five days to mark an exam, exactly that working week.’
How did you approach this?
‘Normally, the first exam takes place in the eighth week of the quartile, with the resit in the tenth week. I moved the resit to the third week of the next module, which meant that module could start a week earlier. The project also had to be completed by week nine. There is no other teaching during that resit week. This was intended to create more time between the exam and the resit. That gives lecturers more breathing room, but above all, it gives students more time. They have longer to prepare properly for the resit, and it also no longer clashes with completing the projects.’
What did this achieve?
‘Eliminating the third attempt saved more than two hundred teaching hours in an academic year. I also saw that a larger number of students passed the first exam, which meant that the number of students taking a resit was halved for many courses. The bonus of passing on the first attempt is, after all, an entire week off. Fewer students taking the resit means another two hundred hours of work saved.’
How did students and lecturers respond to the new setup?
‘Students were predominantly positive. Those who passed an exam straight away were happy to have an entire week off. For international students in particular, this provided an opportunity to go home for a while. Students who had to take a resit had extra time, which was especially helpful if they had been ill during the first exam. And for the occasional student who lost the opportunity for a third attempt, and for whom that attempt was necessary to meet the binding recommendation on continuation of studies, I can take this into account as programme director when determining this. In the past four years, I have only had to do this once. Lecturers were initially somewhat more mixed in their responses, but I get the impression that they no longer feel that five-day deadline, which quickly led to pressure in the evenings and at weekends. A happy teacher is required for a happy student, right?’
Is this something the whole of UT should embrace?
‘The findings were shared with the University Committee for Education last January. What the university wants to do with this is not up to me. What I do know is that every attempt a student makes costs money. Within my programme, 30 percent of the costs are made up of exams, as is the case at many other programmes. This new setup already results in a 10 percent reduction in costs. That is not insignificant, especially in light of the budget cuts and our desire to keep a grip on the costs of our education. I therefore think it would certainly be worthwhile for this university to ask itself: how do we deal with our exams and their scheduling?’
