After serving a year as president of the Government of the Student Body, I learned an exceptional amount about how our great university operates. However, this letter is not about what I have learned, but instead about the things that still need to be changed going forward if we want to give students the best experience possible. Though these are my opinions, I know for a fact that after engaging a number of students, these opinions speak for them as well.

The classroom experience at Iowa State is an essential part of the overall experience for many students. In the future, it is my hope — as well as the hope of many students — that things such as Dead Week policies and universal excused absence polices will be implemented in the near future. Iowa State needs policies that will hold faculty accountable within the classroom environment. A majority of those in the campus constituency would argue that these are agreeable policies, but still others would argue that you are infringing on faculty members’ academic freedom in the classroom by mandating what policies they must follow (I will let a faculty member tell how that argument goes).

Today we continue to see the detrimental effects that these issues are having on students. For example, there are countless numbers of students who have been unable to make up exams, homework or other assignments because they missed class representing Iowa State at a particular function. These functions could be anything from a club or athletic competition, a conference at which they were presenting or even a search committee they participated in for an ISU employee. It is a little unfair that these students were not given opportunities to make up work. I think without a doubt that all students and many faculty members would agree.

Dead Week has been an issue for a number of years, and a Dead Week resolution signed 10 years ago has done very little to curb the negative impacts on students during the time of final exams. Dead Week should be a week set aside to studying and completing those semester papers and projects, not another week to throw a quarterly exam in at the end of the school year. Though there are numerous opinions about Dead Week and its many complexities, the one point that nearly all students and faculty can agree on is the banning of double testing during Dead Week.

This simply means you can’t offer a quarter exam during Dead Week and follow it up the next week with a comprehensive final. I do not think it would be too much to ask to move the quarter exam up a week. I don’t think any faculty member would consider double testing a best practices teaching method, so it begs the question, why do we allow it?

While these classroom policies may seem like common sense to many students, unfortunately that is not the case for some faculty members. While I must admit the problem is not universal among all professors and I do not mean to throw all professors into this category, a select minority has the power to produce the negative effects.

Going forward, faculty members must stop picturing themselves as the only stakeholders in the shared governance model and realize there are nearly 30,000 on this campus that are also just as significant stakeholders. As far as the classroom experience goes, more collaboration needs to be done between the Faculty Senate and student government.