After more than five years in the planning stages, Ball State University could be steps away from eliminating Saturday finals from the 2006-07 academic calendar. The University Senate is scheduled to vote on the proposal Thursday at its 4 p.m. meeting in Cooper Nursing Building, room 160.
If approved, it will need final approval by President Jo Ann Gora and Interim Provost Deborah Balogh to go into effect.
The plan eliminates Saturday finals and a day of Fall Break and allows for a "Fruesday," where students would attend Friday classes on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving Break. The extra Friday classes are needed to maintain an equal number of days spent in class for each day of the week.
"This is the one that, to the best of my knowledge, the president, provost, students and faculty are all on board," Bruce Hozeski, chairman of University Senate, said. "The difficulty with this type of thing is every individual can find a different way to do it. This is one that will work and I think is this one we should do."
Legislation recommending the removal of Saturday finals appeared in Student Government Association Student Senate in 2001 and was approved unanimously. Since then, several forms of the proposal have worked through both Student and University senates.
This is a compromise, former SGA president Steve Geraci said. It prevents the administration from completely getting rid of Fall Break.
"That's something people just don't understand," he said. "This is not about losing a day of Fall Break, this is about saving a day of Fall Break."
As one of Team Us' platform issues, the former executives pushed the calendar issue from their first week in office until the end of the term. Gora and Balogh helped create this proposal, Geraci said.
Current SGA President Asher Lisec also supports the plan and said she would vote for it at the University Senate meeting.
"If Saturday finals were not taken care of, Fall Break would not exist," she said. "I believe we should try something and if it works, great, and if not, we should try something else."
Despite some debate and controversy, the plan for the calendar passed through both the Undergraduate Education Committee and the Faculty Council with a strong majority vote, Hozeski said. Geraci said this was the best compromise and should be tried.
"To throw this out or supplement it with a different plan at this stage is really an inappropriate course of action," Geraci said. "All we are proposing is we try this for a year."
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