Professors overwork students before finals

The pressure of registration has finally passed (that's another story in itself), and now we're all looking forward to the holiday season: warm turkey on the table, gifts, and most importantly, four weeks of freedom from schoolwork.Most of us are taking between 15 and 18 credits this semester. That means four or five classes, not one, as each professor apparently likes to sometimes think. I feel many professors believe their class is the most important, enjoyable and only class I must be taking that semester. Therefore, the work assigned in one week, especially the week before Thanksgiving break, is piled on as opposed to being more evenly distributed.

Now, I understand the end of the semester catches up with all of us faster than we expect, and professors need to cram a lot of information into the last few weeks before finals. However, making students hammer out one paper or project and study for a final chapter exam in each class really adds up. That happens to be four or five projects and four or five tests to prepare for, all while still learning more curriculum with a final exam lingering in the back of each student's minds.

Because the heavy workload envelopes our minds during the pre-holiday season, students find themselves saying "bye-bye" to their GPAs, social lives and holiday cheer.

Distributing projects and tests evenly throughout the semester is really ideal. I would rather have more work during "dead" times in the semester than right before Thanksgiving and Christmas. And there definitely are "dead" times. There are numerous weeks each semester when I found myself with hardly any out-of-class work, and during stressful times before the holidays I wish I could have had this work back during a workless week.

In addition to an extreme amount of work before Thanksgiving, I have additional assignments and tests in the two week span before finals week. This is time I want, and need, to spend learning the end-of-class curriculum and studying hard for finals.

Many students rely on finals to boost their GPAs and treat them as a big deal. Professors stress the importance of finals, yet all of our minds wander during the holiday season, classes get sidetracked and before we know it, we just spent 50 minutes talking about the swine flu instead of information pertaining to class for the final exam.

We all need to take the initiative to keep our minds in check and not focus on pointless projects just thrown in for another grade or wasting class time and making students wonder why they even rolled out of bed for it.

Busy work projects just stress students out more, and packing final tests into the semester really shouldn't happen. Professors can't expect students to be directing all of their attention to one class; we have four more, too. We all have the same thing on our minds, holiday cheer, so as a student I beg professors to allow us to have some.