The only thing more satisfying than stepping out of an exam room after your last test of finals week is seeing your hard work paid off in the form of an A. One of the most nerve-wracking things for a college student is waiting to see if they’ve made a return on investment—did the hard work pay off? Or will that chemistry course have to be retaken?
Nothing ruins the holidays quite like waiting on grades that won’t come nearly a week after the New Year. Much to the dismay of the undergraduate student body of the University of New Haven, this semester, final grades were released Jan. 6, twenty days after the last day of finals week.
Over the last few years, grades were delivered to students as their professors finished grading their finals—the wait ranged from hours after the final exam to, at most, a week or two after their last test. Speaking from experience, I waited a little over a week for my last grade to be posted last semester.
Students were warned on Dec. 10 in an email from the UNH Registrar’s Office that viewing final grades would not be available until the end of “term processing,” but students brushed this email off without a second glance. It was, after all, sent out merely 12 hours before the beginning of hell week (a term most often associated with finals; hell week is characterized by lack of sleep, over-caffeinating and stress-eating, which also leads to forgetting sometimes important details sent out by the registrar’s office).
Undergrad students waited patiently for the first week during winter break for their grades, but as time passed, patience waned and they took to social media sites to complain about the wait.
Waiting over 20 days for results that were most likely ready the day or two after the final was taken is nothing short of torture. As college students, we work hard enough as is to make sure we get the best possible grades we can get. During finals week, and the week leading up to it, we get inundated with mounds of responsibilities and become walking time bombs, running on caffeine and the fear of failure. We become tangled balls of nerves and stress—the least UNH can do is make sure we get our grades in a timely fashion.
By the time grades were accessible, I barely remembered the tests I took and didn’t get quite the same gratification when seeing high scores as I would have right after an agonizing test. Students were not only put through extraordinary amounts of anxiety while waiting for final grades, but were also robbed of the excitement and relief of seeing their grades due to the amount of time between the final exam and the release of grades.
Hopefully by next semester, the Registrar’s Office will have all the kinks in their new Banner system ironed out, and we’ll be back to the old system of viewing finals grades as they come in, rather than waiting almost a month to see them all at once.
