A new policy put in place by the Faculty Senate this year has changed the future of final exams at Binghamton University.

The Faculty Senate, a representative body of professors from every department at BU, voted unanimously in the spring of 2014 to ban instructors from giving final examinations or end-of-course tests during the week before finals week.

According to the motion presented before the Faculty Senate, the week before finals had become a de facto final exam week for professors who, for their own scheduling reasons, did not opt-in for a time during the official finals week.

Donald Nieman, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs of BU, said that the new policy is in place to make sure students have the full semester to learn and study.

“We pride ourselves on offering rigorous courses, and students need the full 14 weeks of the semester to complete assignments and master the material,” Nieman said. “The new policies are also designed to ensure that students have time to prepare for final examinations by assuring that the last week of classes is not filled up with exams.”

The Office of Course Building and Academic Space Management (CBASM) schedules all finals, so now in order for faculty to administer exams outside of the official time slots they must get permission from the deans of their schools and then go through the office.

According to the CBASM website, courses are automatically registered for a final exam, aside from independent study, internships and practicums, and instructors need only request makeup exams. The dean of each school must provide CBASM with a list of classes that do not commonly have a final or have an “alternative method evaluation,” such as Writing 111 or music performance courses.

Similarly, students who cannot make it to their respective final during exam week must continue to go through their professor and the CBSAM to schedule a makeup, as before the policy was revised. Some students, though, were forced to reschedule their exams.

Laura Keim, a senior majoring in music, had to make plans to take her finals the week before finals week because she graduated Sunday and is attending a wedding on Wednesday.

“I just have too much to do for graduation,” she said. “I just can’t stay around here — it doesn’t make sense — so I’m just doing my finals and final projects [early].”

According to Nieman, the policy also states that students are not required to take more than two final exams in a 24-hour period. If a student’s schedule exceeds this, the teacher with the largest class must arrange a makeup exam.

Chris Geadrities, a Latin professor who started this fall, said he was not aware of the policy change until a colleague forwarded him an email from Nieman. By that time, he had accommodated several students who had a conflicting Chem 107 exam.

“As it turns out, this was not my responsibility,” Geadities said. “I didn’t know this at the time.”

Professor Diane Sommerville, a history professor and a member of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee, agreed that the old system was unfair to students who did not have the full semester to prepare for exams. According to her, though, many professors were probably not aware of all the changes.

“Some are a bit confused about not longer having to request an exam time and that was always a strange procedure,” she wrote in an email. “Most institutions assume every instructor is administering a final exam and schedule them accordingly.”