Finals schedule sparks different viewpoints

December 12, 2018 — by Angelina Chen and Amanda Zhu

The new finals schedules is a response to teacher complaints about unfairness.

This semester, according to principal Paul Robinson, the finals schedule was revamped in order to take into consideration complaints from teachers with finals on Monday and Thursday.

The Monday schedule will now have 20-minute periods in all seven classes followed by the two-hour second-period final in afternoon. On Tuesday, fourth and sixth have their finals in the morning. On Wednesday, fifth- and seventh-period finals take place. And the week ends with first- and third-period finals on Thursday.

The administration wanted to ensure that no teachers were stuck with an inconvenient final timeblock every semester, and given that the Monday and Thursday finals warranted the mos t complaints from staff, they wanted to ensure the schedule was “rotated equitably.”

“We work it through with our leadership team, which is all of our department chairs and all of our administrators and teacher coordinators,” said Robinson. “We think: what's the best way to set this up and should we do some kind of rotation because not everybody wants to be the last final.”

Robinson said that seventh-period teachers were given special consideration this year to make sure they aren’t always the last final.

“The hard part is that it’s a real class, that's why we try to move it around so that it gets treated like every other final,” said Robinson.

Robinson and the administration started planning this year’s finals schedule by setting up three possible combinations. However, after leadership from Los Gatos High proposed an alternate schedule, Saratoga opted to follow their lead.

“After a few basic adjustments, I think what we finally ended up with was pretty good,” Robinson said. “The schedule will have odd number classes and even number classes on the same day, with “an even number class that sits out by itself.”

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