Students slam Warwick’s exam timetable as stress levels rise

As exam season slowly comes to a close, students express frustrations over difficult exam timetables and rising stress levels.

Term 3 saw deadlines and revision burdens pile up across the University of Warwick, while students told The Boar that their stress levels were rising, not solely because of their fast-approaching assessments but also due to their exam timetables.  

Complaints have ranged from back-to-back exams to last-minute changes, as well as assessments scheduled deep into June. Individuals have described the system as “unfair” and “frustrating”.  

Running from 18 May until 25 June, the summer exam block is the University’s biggest assessment period, which sees most students sitting their primary end-of-year in-person, online, and take-home assessments. 

While this examination period is five weeks long, a final year Psychology student has told The Boar that all their six 24-hour online assessments are taking place with only one day between each of them.  

“I think they’ve planned it to suit the University and the lecturers, which I understand because they have to mark a lot, but I don’t think they have thought about the students because it adds a lot of pressure when you have an exam every other day”, she explained. 

The exam timetables are released far too late and very little information about the assessments is provided before the release

Anonymous first year student

The University has put this tight scheduling down to the “range of modules and lots of optionality across courses that it offers”, telling The Boar that it “will continue to work to minimise the exam timetabling issues that this can sometimes cause”. 

It also has stated that: “[the University] has a range of targeted measures during the exam and assessment period in Term 3, such as Destresstival, to help students with their wellbeing.” 

Destresstival runs throughout the entirety of the summer term, having begun approximately two weeks after students found out when their exams would take place. They received their timetables during the week beginning 13 April, just over a month before the assessment period began. 

“The exam timetables are released far too late and very little information about the assessments is provided before the release”, a first-year student told The Boar. 

Last year the schedule was published even later with the University saying that “in response to student feedback” they worked on their processes so that they “were able to release the summer exam timetable a week earlier than previous years – providing students with more time to prepare”. 

This first timetable includes all exams held in the summer block and requires students to look for their module and the relevant assessment dates. Then, a week later, everyone receives a personalised exam timetable that solely states the tests that they will sit.  

A second-year Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) student told The Boar that they were confused after initially seeing that the “non-finalist Applied Ethics exam” was scheduled for 18 May on the main timetable, only for the date on their personalised timetable to be different.  

The latter schedule revealed that the assessment would actually occur on 18 June, a date which had originally been marked for finalists only.  

After flagging this to relevant staff they were told that the date had been changed to a month later.  

“After having the original timetable for over a week I made plans at my job and to gain work experience and rushed another deadline to start to prepare for the earlier date”, they stated. 

Now their shifts are misaligned, and their work experience plans may not be able to go ahead as they have another month to spend at university before their summer holidays begin.  

Moreover, a third-year Classical Civilisation student, whose coursework assignments all finish on 26 May, has an exam in mid-June. 

“My dissertation was finished in March as well, but this exam is on 17 June, and we were told finalists’ exams were prioritised, but clearly that’s not the case”, they said. 

While they recognise that it is “silly to complain about one exam allocation”, they also now know that this final assessment “will hang over” their final term at the University.  

Not all students view the exam period negatively, with one student telling The Boar that exams “might not be ideally distributed but that’s life”

Adding to this frustration is the fact that they will only have one revision lecture as the Monday May bank holiday cancelled their second one. 

This final year is not the only student who wishes that their departments scheduled more revision lectures. 

“We only have two revision sessions total, one for each exam, and I hoped they would offer more since we have not got any lectures this term”, explained a Film Studies student. 

Echoing this sentiment is a concerned Politics, Philosophy, and Law (PPL) student who told The Boar at the end of April that they “have not started logic yet” but have a “whole section” on the topic in their exam.  

Despite these frustrations, not all students view the exam period negatively, with one student telling The Boar that exams “might not be ideally distributed but that’s life”. 

“It’s not that bad, is it?”, the Economics fresher asked. 

Yet for others, late scheduling changes, compressed assessments, and limited academic support have made this exam period particularly overwhelming.