Good Afternoon Director Tal,

I’m writing this email to shed light on some difficulties the students of Psych 2022M are having with regards to the midterm test we wrote on Wednesday July 15th, from 7:00 pm to 8:40pm. Many of the students felt that we would have done much better on this midterm if we were allotted more time to complete the exam, as we felt there was not enough time to properly write the exam. From what we remember there was 7 short answer questions, worth I believe 43 points, and 23 multiple choice questions worth 2 points each. We believe that the material was fair, but the lack of time provided made it extremely stressful and harder to complete the exam to our best of our ability. Many students had no choice but to leave many questions blank because the short answer questions consisted of paragraph’s of information, which required lots of time to read and examine which took away from the time needed to do the actual calculations. As well, many students with last names L to Z who wrote in Curtis Lecture Hall D felt that it was unfair because many students were early for their exam but we were only let into the room at 7:03pm and by the time many students got to their seats and took out their writing utensils, it was about 7:10pm and we had no compensated time due to them running a little late in setting up the exam room prior to our exam, yet we were still expected to finish our exam promptly at 8:40pm. Some students talked to the teaching assistants after the exam, and they agreed that we should have had more time to complete the exam because many short answer questions required many steps and processes. I believe that if we had enough time which would have lead to a calmer environment that many students would have done much better on this exam.

We believe that we should have been allotted more time to finish this exam, because time limit caused extra anxiety to many students, which we believe greatly impacted our ability to write the test to the best of our ability. Our goal is to succeed and do well; many of us created study groups and finished every question in the textbook and discussed every concept in order to do well in this class. Our concerns stretch beyond the first midterm as much of this material is the foundation to our future understanding of new concepts taught in this class.

Thank you for your time,

The students of Psyc 2022M, Summer 2015