Letters: Opinions on Durham’s Easter term
What’s the point of Easter term?
By Emily Walker
To the editors…
Most students face waning energy levels at this point in the year, yet face closely packed deadlines in a race to get everything done in the first few weeks of Easter term. This
inevitably renders the rest of the term seemingly obsolete, since there is nothing necessarily tying people down in Durham aside from the desperate hope of decent summer weather, observatory hill picnics and summer balls. For humanities students, this lethargy is particularly noticeable since there is little reason for their return to university at all for the Easter term, which simply marks the looming threat of online exams. As a language student, I have marginally more impetus to revise and be present at university due to in-person assessments. Yet, how do we expect most humanities students to retain high levels of motivation when their sole academic commitment is open-book exams?
On the other hand, for STEM students, lectures and workshops continue during the first two weeks of term, as well as several in-person exams during the exam period. Therefore, they have much more motivation to continue studying throughout the month of May. As usual, compared to humanities students, they certainly get more out of their tuition fees than we do!
The hill colleges are arguably the most blissful location to spend the long-awaited post-exams period, allowing for peaceful walks, sports, and socialising in green spaces on sunny days. However, as a Bailey student, I will always remain biased and defend the routes around the river and the Cathedral.
Whatever your college, degree and exam schedule, we can all unite in a collective yearning for long summer days free of summative stress when there are no restrictions to the amount of catching up and college bar crawls with friends available to arrange!
Is having fun not reason enough?
By Katie Low
To the editors…
For someone like me who looked at their exam timetable and saw their one singular exam was on the 11th of May, it is hard not to ask, ‘What is the point of Easter term?’ But the criticism that Easter term at Durham is ‘listless’ misses what it is actually for. Firstly, this lull is not unique to Durham. Every university has a period after teaching ends where routine eases and exams finish at different paces. Durham simply makes that interval visible by formalising it into a full ten-week term.
Once the pressure of Michaelmas and Epiphany goes, university life can start to shift. People attend events because they want to. Conversations are longer. People can spend time on other creative endeavours. This matters because a university experience should not be the accumulation of assessed work. It should also be the gradual building of networks, communities and habits of participation. The final weeks of Easter term, when exams are finished and the last essays are submitted, are exactly the time to be creative, active and social.
Think back to when you had five essays due at once. Maybe that is you now. Now imagine a few weeks where you can spend time with friends, free from academic pressure. For many, that is the ideal. So why is it so often questioned?
Events like balls and college days carry weight. Remove Easter term and you weaken what differentiates Durham from semesterised universities. Thus, Easter term is not a waste of time, it is where much of the university’s social and cultural value is produced.
If anything, is having fun not reason enough?
Is it Easter term, or the modern British university?
By Pippa Lewin
Anyone who has experienced it knows that Easter term is lopsided; after a month of all-out stress, making the most out of the reinstated 24-hour opening times of the Billy B, you are left with six weeks of… well, whatever you want. It’s different for everyone, and for some people it means going home. You may not interact with another person in your course; you need not interact with anyone at all. This term is certainly flawed, but why stop there?
As we start to question the point of Easter term, it brings to light resonant issues that run throughout the year. Lectures are uploaded online, and office hours increasingly take place on Teams. Many of our degrees provide almost no physical tether to Durham. Given the relative inattention paid to seminar attendance, students can go weeks without setting foot in a University building during Michaelmas and Epiphany as well.
Undoubtedly, any student who partakes in such behaviour may find themselves missing out on invaluable aspects of that so valuable ‘student experience’… But in a culture like this, if we didn’t have our college system (and, unfortunately, even with it), many people may struggle to find any connection at university.
Before Blackboard, Panopto, Teams, and even before computers, students used to come together in times of academic endeavour as well as extracurricular fun. So, should the University force students by monitoring lecture attendance and making it compulsory? Is it time to do away with the online lecture, to say goodbye to 24-hour exams? Or, perhaps we should question deeper and ask why it is that students need to be forced to go at all?
While most British universities may operate similarly, this does not mean that an alternative way of organising higher education isn’t possible. Modules could be more flexible, classes more interactive, and degrees less rigid overall.
Investigating the problems of the Easter term may just reveal some of the key problems with the organisation and practice of British universities as a whole.
Image: Tom Page via Wikimedia Commons
