Most students are so focused on exams that they do not give the time and place of their test another thought, but how is the schedule of finals created?

Terry Kelley-Wallace, of the Binghamton University registrar, is responsible for directing the planning of the finals schedule.

“As you can imagine, it can be a very complex and time-consuming process,” she said.

In the past, scheduling was done in such a way that Associate Professor and Director of Environmental Studies Peter L. Knuepfer called “entirely random, or seemed to be anyway.”

Knuepfer said that, under the previous system, many of his students could have exam schedules packed with tests at the beginning of exam week, and that some would even end up with two exams scheduled at the same time.

That is what happened to sophomore political science major Benjamin Summers, who in the first semester of his freshman year had two exams overlapping by 35 minutes.

“I would have had to miss 35 minutes of my second exam,” he said, but he finished the first exam in time to show up for the start of his second exam.

This year, in an effort to streamline the finals schedule, the University registrar’s office conferred with the schools within BU and developed a new method of making the schedule.

“If a class meets on [Tuesday and Thursday], the final would be on Tuesday as close to the class time as possible,” Kelley-Wallace said. Under the new system, finals are scheduled as close as possible to the times during which they normally meet.

But even with this streamlined measure, the task continues to be a process of working through time limits.

The time required for finals is longer than a typical class time, she said. Time constraints and the limited availability of rooms mean that the exam schedule cannot be perfectly aligned with the weekly schedule of classes. But Kelley-Wallace and her office make small adjustments to the schedule to keep it as close as possible to the weekly schedule.

This sort of tinkering is characteristic of the scheduling process as a whole, which spans several months and begins well in advance of finals week. Even now, the finals schedule for the spring semester is in its early developmental stages.

“We have already requested final exam requests from faculty for May 2010,” Kelley-Wallace said.

The planning process begins when an instructor or department informs the registrar’s office which classes require a final exam to be scheduled.

According to Kelley-Wallace, once all classes are accounted for, she and her office put together a mock-up of the schedule. Once the semester begins and students and professors settle into their classes, the registrar’s office produces a schedule that is more concrete.

That rough final draft, said Kelley-Wallace, “will be sent to the associate dean or assistant dean of each school for their review prior to publication.”

Then, if the department has objections to the schedule, they can appeal to the registrar’s office.

“A faculty member can request that the time we assign be changed,” Kelley-Wallace said. “We then try to accommodate the change so that the adjustment doesn’t cause other scheduling conflicts.”

But even then a number of issues and conflicts can arise in the formation of the schedule.

“Some very large classes require large rooms all over campus to accommodate double seating,” Kelley-Wallace said. “Therefore, some of these classes must be scheduled in the evening.”

The office also tries to anticipate and resolve the most predictable potential conflicts.

“We try very hard to make sure conflicts are avoided as much as possible,” Kelley-Wallace said. “For example, we would not schedule physics, calculus and chemistry finals on the same day or at the same time.”

The registrar also tries to be as fair as possible. No department or school receives priority scheduling slots. There are cases, however, in which some classes have their finals scheduled before others.

Kelley-Wallace said that courses with a very large number of students often require double seating to prevent students from sitting next to one another during an exam. Because the larger rooms are in limited supply, the larger classes are given priority for those rooms.

This year, Summers is much happier with his schedule.

“It worked out, time-wise, very well,” he said, indicating that he was “fairly pleased.”

Knuepfer said he received a similar impression from his students about their final exams. “It sounds like they did a better job of spreading them out throughout the week,” he said.