By Wilma Tynkkynen and Deirdre de Leeuw den Bouter
A new academic calendar is being piloted for the 2023-2024 school year. In contrast to previous years, the calendar includes three additional class-free weeks and increased class length, from one and a half hours to one hour and 45 minutes. The additional class-free weeks are a welcome addition for students. “A lot of people have been working straight since the start of January, and it’s been rough,” says first-year Social Science student Charlotte Hartmann.
The new calendar classifies three categories for breaks: the proper break, reading week, and wrap-up week. Marianne Riphagen, Director of Education, outlines that the distinction between the three is very important. During the proper break, no work will be assigned and there can be no subsequent assessments on the first day students return. For reading weeks, work can be assigned. And lastly, during wrap-up weeks students who have missed any assessments will be able to make them up, while students who haven’t missed anything will not be required to remain on campus.
Riphagen touches on the need for the new creation of a wrap-up week, something the previous academic calendar did not have. “We see some AUC students struggle with deadlines, or for a force majeure or personal circumstances they miss an exam and they request from the examiner an alternative date, and that in itself causes some issues.We thought it might be much easier if we situate that in the wrap-up week,” Riphagen explains.
Due to the new nature of these categories, Riphagen expands on the need for clarity to both lecturers and students about the expectations during these breaks. “We have to make sure that we have clear guidelines as to what is expected during these weeks, or what is also not allowed,” Riphagen says. However, she adds that “we don’t have a calculation for how many hours a lecturer must [assign during] a reading week. I think that should be left to the autonomy of the lecturer and it depends from class to class.”
The calendar is a nation-wide pilot that will run for two academic years. Throughout the process, AUC will receive funding to do monitoring, evaluations, and to provide feedback to UvA about the pilot. While the details of the monitoring have not been worked out yet, Riphagen emphasises the perspectives of students, lecturers, and support staff in the continuing evolution of the calendar.
In Spring 2025, the implemented changes will be reflected in the AS&P. “We will feed the information from the pilot in our findings and experiences into that more policy-oriented process,” Riphagen says, “And that allows us to make changes in terms of assessment and planning of the [future] calendars.”
Students’ opinions and views were taken into account when designing the calendar, such as through a survey sent out last semester asking for input on possible break dates. Generally, students have differing opinions on the new calendar. While some welcome more breaks, others worry about how content will be affected. Moreover, there is still uncertainty on how the implementation will work in practice. “I think that it’s a good idea,” Hartmann says, “Now, it just depends on how they’re going to restructure the actual contents of the semester and the contents of the classes.”
One of the things that will likely change is the assessment structure. Currently, there must be four assessments during the 16-week period of no more than 35% in weight. According to Riphagen, there have been discussions to decrease the number of mandatory assessments to three and slightly increase their possible weight.
The new academic calendar has sparked conversation between lecturers as well, showcasing mixed opinions that lecturers have about the new changes which the new calendar will introduce. Anton Kunst, a lecturer at AUC, says that an increase in class-free weeks does not affect his curriculum much. “I see that it means that there are three classes less. I have to know how to condense the curriculum by combining a few classes,” says Kunst. At the same time, Kunst recognizes that an additional 15 minutes to class time will have implications on his lectures. “It requires me to rethink each class and to see what to do with the additional time. And that’s a lot of work,” he explains. Kunst has even considered disregarding the new rule, saying that he might “just skip the last 15 minutes and give the classes as they were.”
“Some small group of lecturers said that [changing their curriculum] is basically impossible, and that 15 minutes might end up in a break or questions on the class’s topic,” Riphagen explains. She emphasises that lecturers who expressed this during the studies related to redesigning the calendar were a small minority.
Michael McAssey, a lecturer at AUC, is one of the few staff members who have expressed their dissatisfaction with the changes to the new academic calendar. “It has a profound effect on the classes I teach. It means that either I have to cut out content from the courses or I have to try to squeeze that into less lecture times,” McAssey says. He points out that particularly people who teach mathematical courses have expressed dissatisfaction with the new academic calendar. “[That’s] because we are teaching in a way that requires time, not in the lecture but outside the lecture. And we know students are going to use those extra three weeks as vacation times. So, we don’t see this as okay for our particular teaching style,” McAssey says.
McAssey also highlights the implications that longer lecture times may have on students’ learning during class-time. “A longer lecture means more time your brain is fried and the teacher can’t teach and the students can’t listen, and no learning is going on,” he explains. Taking this into consideration, McAssey has thought about maintaining a similar structure for his classes, considering the possibility of finishing the lectures earlier. “I’ll probably still give my ten-minute break in the middle somewhere, and then I’ll just quit [the lecture] ten minutes earlier.” McAssey says that he was given a chance to express his opinion about the proposed changes to the academic calendar, however concluding that he feels like his opinion “was not taken seriously.”
As the pilot gets implemented over the next two years, AUC will continue to monitor student and staff opinions and the impact of the new calendar on academics. Riphagen describes the process of designing the new calendar as one of the happiest in her time at AUC. “There was a lot of unity,” she says, “We would like some more room and space to breathe in this calendar.”
The Herring 