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Update on the academic calendar pilot at AUC

19 June 2025

Since January 2023, AUC’s Liberal Arts and Sciences programme has been part of the UvA pilot “A Smarter Academic Year.” The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science designed this pilot for Dutch universities to create a calmer academic year with more room for rest and activities outside of the classroom (such as research, designing education, internships and extracurricular activities).

Description and set-up of the pilot

Fourteen Dutch universities and one university of applied sciences are part of the pilot. As a participant in the national pilot, the UvA created three (sub)pilots for which programmes could sign up for: 

  • Variations on the academic calendar

  • Automated assessment experiments

  • Designing and implementing a scan to identify challenges in organising, teaching and studying specific programmes

AUC signed up for and now participates in (sub)pilot 1: variations on the academic calendar. AUC does this together with the UvA’s Bachelor's in Mathematics (FNWI) and Bachelor's in Cultural Anthropology (FMG).  

Changes to the academic calendar at AUC

AUC decided to adjust its 16-week teaching periods by adding extra class-free weeks. To make this possible without decreasing contact time between lecturers and students, AUC made each class 15 minutes longer. This has allowed space for three non-teaching weeks during the 16-week periods (September through December, and February through May). 

The changes to the academic calendar also sought to mitigate concerns expressed by some within the AUC community. Those concerns focused on the impact that AUC’s academic calendar change would have on workload within the 13 regular teaching weeks, on lecturers’ ability to keep course learning objectives unchanged, on the possibility of staging sufficient extracurricular events and on students’ learning. To counteract negative impacts of the academic calendar change, adjustments were made to assessment rules and better defining the purpose of the class free weeks.

Future developments 

For the 2025-2026 academic year, monitoring efforts will continue at AUC. As the last full year of the pilot, it will be crucial to explore what sorts of changes AUC will want to keep for future years. 

Continuing monitoring efforts 

AUC introduced the changed academic calendar in September 2024. This required changes to the programme of each of AUC's approximately 250 courses and the entire timetable. AUC is continuously monitoring the impacts of the academic calendar change through extensive survey research and focus groups with students and staff.