EXAMS AND TIME ZONES

Rector’s Committee

April 28th 2020

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The state of the art (1/2)

• 61.799 is the number of students/exam we have to manage in the coming months
• The number of courses is 324 (undergraduate, graduate and law).

• 13.363 are international and they represent students both enrolled in Bocconi
(10.009) and incoming back home (3.354)
• The breakdown for time zones is the following:
- 6.103 Europe
- 1.333 Middle East
- 177 Africa
- 2.321 Asia/Oceania
- 2.584 North and South America
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The state of the art (2/2)

• The impact for time zones generates disadvantages :
- Partially relevant for 2.321 Asia/Oceania because the number of students
staying in areas with more than +6 hours is limited
- Very relevant for 2.584 North and South America as they stay between -9 and
-6 hours

• Why to manage them?

- a) Most of international competitors are managing exams using multiple time
slots (i.e. introducing more exams or inserting a «24h rule» for every exam; b)
students (and parents) are very vocal and they ask for a solution: c)
international partners in US are asking as well to protect their students; d) we
are asking the same for our students back home.
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The decisions taken (1/3)

• If the target is for sure the 2.584 North and South America students, it means
exam have to start from 3.00 pm.
• In the meanwhile, students staying in Asia are not disadvantaged for exams
starting at 9.00 am, at 11.00 am and and most of them at 2.00 pm

• The solution is to:

- Adjust the timing of exams starting at 2.00 pm to 3.00 pm for exams having
«American» students
- Create an exams session at 6.00 pm for morning exams having «American»
students
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The decisions taken (2/3)

• If we consider exams having at least 5 «American» students are 124. But only 59
are scheduled at 9.00 am and 11.00 am. The other 65 are scheduled at 2.00 pm
or at 4.30 pm.

• The solution is to work on the 59 scheduled in the morning creating a twin exam
at 6.00 pm and to adjust (when it is possible) the exams scheduled at 2.00 pm
moving them to 3.00 pm

• This solution covers 2.325 students/exams out of 2.568 (i.e., 91%)

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The decisions taken (3/3)

• Issues remaining on the table:
- 9% of «American» students. In many cases they are MSc students staying in
very well identified cluster
- Students staying in Australia and New Zealand and a part of Asian students
staying in a +7 time zones

• What can we do for them?

- To ask to professors involved to help them (if they request) to run an ad hoc
one-to-one exam.
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Next steps for the faculty

• As a consequence of these decisions, three are the options that could involve every
exam:

- Nothing happens
- The exam is moved from 2.00 pm to 3.00 pm
- The exam remains in the original timing but a twin session in the same day is
scheduled at 6.00 pm

• However, in all the three cases it could happen that a very limited number of students
will remain in a disadvantaged time zone. For those students, it is needed to
schedule a one-to-one exam. Every course director will receive the list of those
students and they (and only them) have the right to run this one-to-one exam.