Wednesday, Mississippi State University announced the classes canceled by snow on Jan. 10 will be made up on a to-be-determined Saturday in February or March.
Naturally, this has caused some backlash among students, who are voicing legitimate concerns. Students utilize Saturdays to work, visit home, catch up on sleep, work on homework and projects or just take a break from the grind of classwork. Now, students will have to change their schedules for one Saturday if they can. Right or wrong, many students will probably choose not to show up for class on that Saturday. For that matter, many professors, who have Saturday plans themselves, will probably choose not to have class anyway.
However, as bad as holding class on a Saturday sounds, there really was no other choice. The original plan, which MSU announced, was to make up the classes on April 25, move the reading day to April 26 and hold finals from April 27-May 3.
This plan was met with natural opposition, as many students had already made plans based on the semester ending on April 29. Many students have lined up jobs or internships beginning the next week, and others have leases that expire at the end of April. Telling students they must change their plans to stay an extra few days into May would have been unfair.
Making up the day on April 25 would have been even worse for graduating students, as graduation would have still happened on April 30. Thus, some students would walk for graduation and then have to come back and take more exams. It would be very difficult to get any studying done on a graduation weekend with family in town, and graduating students are even more likely to have job conflicts in the first week of May.
Simply canceling the class time without making it up is not an option. The Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning requires each class to have at least 2,250 minutes of face-to-face meeting time for accreditation purposes, and the original schedule included exactly that many.
Some suggested making up the missed day on April 22, an official MSU holiday on Good Friday. However, in addition to some religious concerns on holding class that day, the university is legally required to have a reading day in which no classes or finals meet, and April 22 is the reading day. If classes met on April 22, then the following Monday, April 25, would have to be the reading day, and finals would have still had to spill over into May.
The only other option would have been to hold class on the Monday or Friday of spring break, and that obviously was not going to fly with anyone. There are no other holidays built into the schedule, so MSU was left with no other choice but to hold classes on a Saturday.
MSU should be commended for working with students and taking their concerns into consideration. MSU originally announced classes would be made up on April 25, but after meeting strong opposition, agreed to change the announced plan to a Saturday. MSU should also be applauded for deciding to ask for more feedback before choosing which Saturday to make up classes. This way, it can try to find the Saturday the fewest people have conflicts with.
However, MSU will hopefully learn from this error and make more accommodating schedules in the future. Classes can be canceled for any reason — it doesn’t have to be snow. If this happens in a fall semester, what will MSU do? It certainly cannot make up classes on a football game day.
In the future, there must be extra days built into the schedule to prevent this from happening again. Those could be extra holidays, or it could be as simple as ending finals in the middle of a week so that they can be pushed back a few days without spilling into an extra week.
In the meantime, students should accept that, while the Saturday class solution is not particularly appealing, it is the least objectionable option on a list of bad solutions.
The Reflector editorial board is made up of opinion editor Wendy Morell, news editor Julia Pendley, assistant news editor Hannah Rogers, sports editor Bob Carskadon, entertainment editor David Breland, photo editor Ariel Nachtigal, copy editors Rachel Burke and Mollie C. Reeves, online editor Matt Witbeck, graphic designer Lauren Cochran, managing editor Harry Nelson and editor in chief April Windham.