Hundreds of Professors Gather To Coordinate Midterm Dates
EVANSTON-- More than 200 professors from all six schools at Northwestern University met this morning in an annual summit dedicated to scheduling midterms in a way that most frustrates and inconveniences undergraduate students, sources report. The meeting, which was held in the Norris Student Center's Louis Room, was called to order at 9:02 am by President Morton Schapiro. Schapiro started off with a few opening remarks about the importance of this annual convention, and what it means to the community.
"I greatly appreciate each and every one of you taking time out of your busy schedules to come gather here on this momentous occasion," said Schapiro. "Without your time and dedication, we would be forced to schedule midterms independently, and that would almost ensure that students would have midterms days, even weeks apart. And what's worse, their midterms could be at reasonable times and accessible places."
"Thanks to all of you, we can guarantee that every student in our community will be completely fucked by three finals on the same day," added Schapiro.
Organic chemistry lecturer Owen Priest expressed his enthusiasm about this year's record-high turnout and what it means for the future of aggressively douching all over the student body's chance at happiness.
"We first started doing this about ten years ago," recalled Priest. "That first year, it was just me and a few other chemistry professors thinking how funny it would be to completely ruin these kids' chances at doing well on midterms. Now, we're working with people from Medill, Bienen, Comm, and even SESP!"
Added Priest, "SESP is just one syllable, right? SESP?"
The convention involved several workshops on how to maximize the extent to which unsuspecting undergraduate students get totally boned by forces out of their control. These workshops focused primarily on teaching the professors new and subtle ways to make things even more obnoxious for their victims.
"There are so many ways to dick over students during midterms that I hadn't even thought about," said Peter Francis Hayes, a distinguished lecturer in the History department. "For example, changing the room of the midterm for no apparent reason. President Schapiro gave me a gold sticker during this simulation because not only did I relocate the midterm, but I relocated it to a room on the third floor of Frances Searle which is virtually impossible to find. It's all about attention to detail."
After a series of morning workshops and a lunch catered by Jimmy John's, the professors spent the afternoon putting their learnings into practice by scheduling midterms for the 2013-2014 academic year. Even though it was a 4-hour process, all the professors seemed to genuinely enjoy it, and morale didn't suffer whatsoever.
As the convention came to a close and all midterms for the coming academic year were scheduled in an unthinkably inconvenient manner, Schapiro closed out the gathering by giving away two awards. The first award, given to an individual professor, was gifted to Economics lecture Mirko Wiederholt, for his "hilarious and incredibly inventive" decision to both reschedule and relocate his two midterms from 3pm Tuesday in Leverone Hall to 8:30am Friday in the Law building on the Chicago campus. The second award, given to a whole department, was given to the Political Science department, who cleverly banded together to ensure that all twenty-four classes offered in the fall would have a 12-page paper due on November 1st.
