Ted Moskal | Staff Reporter

Washington University will update the “10-minute rule” for scheduling next semester. Starting in the fall, classes will officially end 10 minutes earlier instead of beginning 10 minutes after the listed start time.

Currently, students can schedule back-to-back classes, providing a 10-minute gap to travel from one class to the other. For example, a class this semester listed as 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. would actually begin at 10:10 a.m., giving students with classes ending at 10 a.m. a chance to get to class on time. Next semester, the same class would be listed on WebStac as going from 10 a.m. to 10:50 a.m., so students with an 11 a.m. class will still have 10 minutes to transition.

Administrators cite the discrepancy between official start times and actual start times as a cause of confusion, which they say the new rule will fix.

“The primary reason behind this change was to align the published class start and end times in Course Listings with actual class times for all courses,” University Registrar Sue Hosack wrote in a statement to Student Life. “The current reality is a mixed bag of actual and ‘understood’ class times, and it has always caused some degree of confusion… This has been a problem for a long time and something that should have been resolved years ago.”

The official announcement of the change came in the First Year Center’s Bear Bulletin but did not explain why the change was necessary. The lack of student input in this decision has prompted Student Union (SU) to push for more student involvement in such decisions that affect the student body.

“Students just weren’t given any opportunity for feedback,” freshman Anne He, the chair of SU Senate’s Academic Affairs committee, said. “At least the general consensus around the issue is that most students feel like their opinions weren’t heard. In my email to [Senior Associate Provost] Erin Culbreth, she did reply to me and say that she got feedback from the undergraduate council about this last fall and people were supportive of it, but in general with issues like this that impact the entire student body, there should be a better way of garnering student feedback on this from a lot more students.”

Although class duration will stay the same, some students are concerned that the 10-minute shift will throw off their schedules and affect the student experience in a number of ways next semester.

“I might have to get up 10 minutes earlier to go to class now, which is especially annoying since I have some 8 a.m. [classes] next semester,” freshman Ryan Chung said. “The 10-minute rule gave you a little leeway, … but if class starts on the hour, it is much easier to [be late to class].”

SU hopes to work with the administration to resolve whatever issues may arise from the new rule next semester, such as changing the campus circulator’s schedule.

“Another question that I had that I don’t really think the administration thought about was, will the circulator schedule change to accommodate the 10-minute rule change?” He said. “Currently, the circ stops at the clock tower on the hour and if the 10-minute rule were to change I think changes would need to be made to the schedule. … My committee will definitely be following up on that to make sure that it actually changes.”

Despite the logistical challenges of implementing these changes, Hosack believes that the new rule needs to be implemented in order to help students who have no time to transition between afternoon classes and University College evening classes, since the latter do not follow the 10-minute rule.

“The other reason we sought to make this change was to solve a related problem where late afternoon classes were ending at exactly the same time that evening classes were beginning, leaving no turnover time for those classes meeting in the same classroom and no travel time for students who had day and evening classes back-to-back,” Hosack wrote in a statement to Student Life.

He maintains that the administration needs to be more transparent when making these decisions and hopes that SU can hold the administration accountable in the future.

“[Transparency] is definitely something that SU as a whole and Senate specifically is going to try to help the administration with because I think we are a body that is supposed to connect to students,” He said. “I think that it is the responsibility of the administration to do all of this, but if they are making these changes without student input, you can rest assured that Senate will be the ones who will make sure that everything is communicated to the student body.”