Everyone is generally optimistic that this new calendar will be better, she says. But she adds that starting in 1988-89 there will be no reading period and the Jewish holidays will no longer be official school holidays.

While NYU has planned to change its schedule, Harvard has seemed satisfied with a calendar that has changed remarkably little over the years.

With the exception of a temporary quarterly system to accommodate a fluid student body during World II, the University's only change in the last half-century has been, starting 10 years ago, to begin the academic year one week earlier to help students procure summer jobs.

"There are many assets to having exams after Christmas," Law says. "It gives students more time to prepare for exams, it gives them a breathing space. I think it would be awful to have to have exams earlier," she adds.

Whether students want to change Harvard's calendar is unclear, according to the results of a poll by the Undergraduate Council (UC) last year.

In the referendum the UC asked students under what conditions they would like to have exams before Christmas vacation. The questionnaire, which some students criticized as overly complicated, asked students whether they were willing to return to school earlier in the fall and perhaps sacrifice part of reading period or other holidays in order to start the summer earlier.

"The results were inconclusive," says Michael L. Goldenberg '88, a member of the Academic Committee that sponsored the referendum vote. The vote was 49 percent in favor of earlier exams, and 48 percent against earlier exams, from a pool of approximately 40 percent of the college, according to him.

"The results were positive in the philosophy favoring earlier exams, but in terms of the constraints of the schedule--such as sacrificing reading period, students were only marginally supportive," Goldenberg says.

There was strong support--70 percent to 30 percent--for starting the school year a week earlier in order to extend the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, but the University has no plans to change the semester, he says.

Goldenberg opposed Harvard's current calendar because "it makes Christmas a non-vacation, extending the stress period until January, when we have a whole month of hell ahead."

But former member of the council's Academic Committee Melissa S. Lane '88 says she preferred the traditional calendar because it gives students the "leisure of having time to think, write and reflect. It gives the semester a coherence."

Lane says that with another system the semester would be a "hectic and stressful time" in which students would find less time for extracurriculars.

Princeton is the only Ivy whose administrators have chosen to keep the same system that Harvard follows.

"With exams after Christimas, students have more of an opportunity to finish their assignments," says Princeton's Assistant Registrar Joseph L. Greenberg.

"If all the requirements were due before the holiday, there would be more incompletes, and the grades and the quality of the work definitely suffers," he says. There never has been very strong sentiment at Princeton for reshuffling the tried and true schedule.

"Our calendar now is functioning very well, if anything, a change would cause disruption to peoples lives," he says.