A beloved college tradition and complete waste of time, syllabus week is an unnecessary relic of a bygone era. For those of you who are unacquainted with the phenomenon, syllabus week is the week of class sessions at the beginning of the semester usually devoted to handing out and reviewing course syllabi. These sessions normally feature explanations of the university’s policies on attendance, grading, plagiarism, academic integrity, disability services, etc., as well as a brief explanation of the course objectives and schedule. What’s been obvious since the advent of email in 1993 is that this week-long process could be cut down to 15 minutes if anybody wanted to make the change.
The thing is, they don’t. In fact, many students love syllabus week because its relaxed nature makes it nearly equivalent to an extra week of break; and, after some closer analysis, a few extra days of vacation sounds like a more reasonable use of time.
If you’ve been a student for two or more semesters, you’ve probably realized that syllabus week is always the same. The same university policies are reviewed at the beginning of each semester and in every single class. It’s unclear what great benefit warrants this redundancy, there are rarely any major revisions that would make these policies worth a second glance. Additionally, the policies themselves are all either self-explanatory or common knowledge — I doubt that anyone is actually unaware that submitting a plagiarized essay could get them expelled. The whole ordeal is nothing more than a week of college minutia.
Not only is syllabus week pointless, it’s a waste of resources. There is very little in any given syllabus that a professor might need to explain to his or her class; even still, professors must be present for an hour and fifteen minutes and sacrifice time that could be better used working on their research or writing.
But it’s not just a waste of man-hours — it’s dollars and cents, too. Printing may seem like a minor expenditure, but a three-page syllabus multiplied by hundreds of classes and thousands of students can really add up. When most professors post their syllabi online anyway, what is the point of spending all that money? Say what you will about the value of being able to read something on paper as opposed to on a screen, but the sole benefit for thousands of dollars of expenditures shouldn’t be sentimental.
The final issue that makes syllabus week so puzzling is the fact that many professors don’t seem to see the need for it either and have different attitudes on participating in it. Without rhyme or reason some professors try to get through the syllabus as quickly as possible and end 20 minutes early, while others try to shoe-horn miniature lectures to fill up the allotted time. This inconsistency among professors creates uncertain expectations for students and undermines the clarifying benefits that syllabus week is supposed to offer.
It’s the university’s prerogative to make sure that students keep campus policies in mind each semester, but it shouldn't preserve an expensive and convoluted method of doing so. Instead of sending an email or offering just one policy refresher each semester, students have to sit through the deluge of redundancy again and again. College is expensive and every part of it should justify the cost; students are paying to learn and it’s disrespectful to waste their time.