I hear this statement every term. Sometimes it comes with an accusatory glare, as if, somehow, I had engineered the schedule to pick on that particular student. Sometimes it comes with a resigned sigh -- this is usually from students in 3rd or 4th year (or sometimes an enlightened 2nd year student) who have realized that there are corollaries to Murphy's Law that apply to final exam schedules.
Those corollaries go something like this:
- Your first exam will always be scheduled sooner than you are ready for it.
- Your last exam will always be scheduled later than you would like to leave campus.
- The course in which you are having the most difficulty will usually occur first in your schedule, or on the same day as another exam.
- The course with which you have the least trouble will be optimally placed, providing plenty of study time.
- If you are a morning person, your exams will be predominantly afternoon or evening.
- Conversely, if you are a night owl, your exams will mostly be in the mornings.
- Some event that is socially or personally of great interest or of a "once in a lifetime" character (a concert, play, convention, party, vacation, sporting event) will occur in or around your exam schedule.
My staff and I are not quite so psychic or talented to be able to get my scheduling software to intentionally produce such a schedule. If we were, then we could also avoid it! The best we can do is apply King's policy of no conflicting exams and no more than 2 exams in a 24 hour period to our students.
The rest of these characteristics will have to be attributed to some more cosmic source -- perhaps God's wry sense of humour, or (for you reformed types) perhaps this is one of the evidences of the corruption introduced by the Fall. Or perhaps this is a training exercise for the rest of life when our knowledge, skills, experience and maturity are put to the test not only at terrifically inconvenient moments but without any announced schedule at all.
