Fire Safety during College Exams

February 24, 2018 9:13 AM

Is there anything legally preventing a university professor from continuing an exam during an active fire alarm?

Department is trying to come up with a policy regarding the administration/grading of exams that have been interrupted by a fire alarm. Most people in the department seem to think it's fine to treat students evacuating due to a fire alarm as if they were leaving the exam for any other reason (i.e. they turn their test in and it is graded as is.) One went as far as to say that unless they get injured, they can't sue us, so it's fine. I'm looking for a jumping-off-point for something to show to the chair to point out that we have to allow students to evacuate during an alarm and cannot academically punish them for doing so. Is there a principle under which they could sue us in this situation?

This is compounded by the fact that I myself would like to be able to leave during an exam, but right now, I have to administer exams on a certain day, they have to be a certain percent of the total grade, and I must stay in the room with any students continuing the exam in spite of the alarm.

This feels transparently like it must be against fire codes, or OSHA, or general common sense, but finding an authoritative source to back me up has been fruitless so far. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

posted by Navelgazer to Law & Government (28 answers total)

It would be helpful to know what municipality you're in.
posted by arnicae at 9:19 AM on February 24, 2018

Response by poster: I'm sure (And I don't expect anyone to go looking up actual municipal codes here, but any direction would be helpful) but my partner (for whom I'm asking this question) would rather not say.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:22 AM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

On the face of it, that seems totally outrageous. Does your institution have an ombuds office? I'd start there and see if they can help you find the relevant code or office.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:23 AM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

My god, that's egregious. Call the local fire department or fire marshall to ask. Can you imagine if a student stayed and was trapped, injured or killed???
posted by Toddles at 9:26 AM on February 24, 2018 [16 favorites]

Oooh, yeah. The classic "we could be sued" could be one place to start.
posted by amtho at 9:26 AM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

I don't think it's possible for us to advise you definitively without some idea of location, but what the hell? Is your partner working at some shitty for-profit diploma mill? This is appalling. Any U.S. educational institution that is not a pure indefensible garbage fire will have a policy like that of, just e.g., NYU: "It is the policy of the University that when smoke or fire is discovered, the fire alarm must be sounded. Because of the potential for underestimating the seriousness of a fire condition, there are no exceptions to this policy. When the building fire alarm sounds, every Faculty member, Staff and Student is expected to evacuate." Are you sure your partner's school doesn't have one?

Seriously, this is the kind of thing I would consider to be vastly revelatory of the quality of my institution. I appreciate that in practice people get lazy about evacuations. But what your partner's colleague said in discussing principles is indicative of someone with no character at all.
posted by praemunire at 9:31 AM on February 24, 2018 [7 favorites]

I teach at a high school, and if the fire alarm goes off for any reason (drill or actual fire), everyone must evacuate, middle of an exam or not. When I taught at a university, while we never had an instance of the fire alarm going off during a final exam I was proctoring and I don't remember if we ever discussed what our department policy would be if that happened, fire alarms did go off during unit tests and quizzes occasionally and everyone was expected to evacuate as usual.
posted by abeja bicicleta at 9:31 AM on February 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

(This would be especially dangerous, btw, for any disabled or older students who might require extra time or assistance to evacuate.)
posted by praemunire at 9:32 AM on February 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

I agree that it sounds outrageous. I would be furious if this was my department. What a pigheadedly negligent attitude.

I can't help much, but it seems so outrageous that I thought it must be addressed somewhere and I did some cursory searching. I didn't find any relevant laws, but I did find universities/schools with much more sensible policies, like this one:

In the event a fire alarm is activated or there is a power failure while a final exam is in progress, the following procedure will be used.

1) Students will evacuate the exam rooms, leaving all exam materials and computers in the exam rooms.

2) The exam administration staff will note the time and lock the exam rooms.

3) When re-entry to the exam rooms is allowed, a member of the exam administration staff will notify students of the adjusted times. The assistant dean for academic services or Student Records Office personnel will determine if, and how much, extra time will be allowed for completion of exams due to the disruption.

Or this one:

In the unlikely event that a final examination is disrupted by events other than construction noise (see Class Disruptions) such as by a fire alarm, electrical outage, tornado warning, or other unpredictable incident, instructors must make whatever immediate decision seems appropriate to insure the safety of students.

When possible, instructors should maintain examination security (for instance, by having students turn in examination papers as they leave the room). If the incident is of short duration, sufficient time may have elapsed (or remain) that the instructor may be able to simply shorten the examination.

The instructor should contact the DEO for help in creating an equitable solution to the grading problems that the disruption causes. In most cases, especially with large classes, it will not be possible to schedule a makeup examination. In situations where exam security has been maintained, some portion of credit may be allocated for the examination. In other cases, it may be appropriate to recalculate grades without including an examination grade.

They're probably worried about students pulling the alarm to get out of their exams, but that's no excuse for putting students at risk in the case of an alarm. I found one discussion where someone mentioned that their school has put TAs near fire alarms to prevent this from happening - that seems like a better solution if this is an issue at your school.

Your first step (which I suspect you've done) is to check your school's policies, because it's likely that there already is one. But if there's no policy or if the policy is vague regarding instructors' responsbilities, I personally would also call the legal office to ask this question.

This is just flat-out dangerous and I wouldn't let it go.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:38 AM on February 24, 2018 [5 favorites]

Holy cow, that's ridiculous. I was in the middle of taking the GRE once when the fire alarm went off, and the proctor paused all of our tests and we left along with everyone else. We resumed as if it hadn't happened once the all-clear was given. If the GREs can be paused and resumed, surely individual course exams can and should be.
posted by DingoMutt at 9:41 AM on February 24, 2018 [5 favorites]

In many jurisdictions, failure to evacuate the building during a fire alarm is, at least theoretically, a civil violation punishable by a fine (contact your friendly local fire marshal for details). This is true even if the alarm is a drill, fraudulent, or otherwise not presenting a hazard to life and limb. Your department does not want to be punishing people academically for compliance with the law. That is a grievance case waiting to happen.

Remaining in the room to finish the exam should not only not be expected, but should be disallowed. The instructor should oversee the evacuation of all students and either secure the room or hold the exams until the evacuation is over (or reconvene to finish the exam at a different location).
posted by jackbishop at 9:56 AM on February 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

I don’t understand how this could be a departmental rather than an institutional decision. Is there a way for your partner to take this outside of the department without repercussions? There is no way a university would be OK with this. Even if the worst thing that happens is that a student gets a bad grade, students have sued for less than that.
posted by FencingGal at 9:56 AM on February 24, 2018 [13 favorites]

Unfortunately a derisive attitude towards safety regulations is part of the culture at some institutions, even/especially R1s. That doesn't make it okay, but you may have to involve people from outside the department in order to reality check them.

(I'm guessing OP's partner works in a chemistry department, but that's just my own bias, lol...)
posted by en forme de poire at 9:56 AM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

Unfortunately a derisive attitude towards safety regulations is part of the culture at some institutions, even/especially R1s.

In practice, that kind of attitude towards existing regulations...totally. But usually even minimally competent institutions have grown-ups drafting the policies. (Because that's the first place the lawyers will look if there's a lawsuit.)
posted by praemunire at 10:00 AM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

This actually happened during a physics class. We left our exam papers on the desk and left the building. This didn't stop my less than honest classmates from cheating by discussing the answers.
posted by kathrynm at 10:03 AM on February 24, 2018

If the GREs can be paused and resumed, surely individual course exams can and should be.

At my institution, the problem is that we have a big space crunch, and every available room is booked solid from 7:30 AM until 10:00 at night, during regular school sessions and during the exam period. You can't pause and resume without a huge domino effect. This came up last semester, when there was a fire alarm during a final exam, and they made the students turn in the exams and evacuate, even though there was still more than a half-hour left in the exam. (I know this because a student worker in my office was one of the people taking the exam. She's a slow, methodical test-taker, and she was upset that she lost time she had been counting on using.) I have no idea how they dealt with grading: I suspect that they graded what students had done, curved it, and then downplayed or disregarded the final exam if it would significantly hurt a student's grade. At least, that's what I would have done. But they couldn't have paused and resumed, because the room needed to be available pretty much immediately for the next exam.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:06 AM on February 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you all! ArbitraryAndCapricious has it about right in terms of the situation, and I have contacted the fire commissioner for clearer information and literature.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:30 AM on February 24, 2018

You almost certainly have an environmental health and safety office, and your specific building probably has a safety officer or two as well who are supposed to clear the building if there is an alarm. I’d talk to them because whoever is trying to implement this needs to have a serious talk with the folks in charge of keeping students safe.
posted by tchemgrrl at 11:10 AM on February 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

In contrast, when I was a chemistry major in buildings with inert gas fire suppression, the academic policy was that the first time you failed to obey a fire alarm you failed that lab session, and the second time you failed the course. This is, of course, because ignoring fire alarms, particularly in laboratory buildings, can be fatal.
posted by mercredi at 11:10 AM on February 24, 2018 [8 favorites]

I'm just picturing your school's lawyer's face if she or he caught wind of this insanity. Ask them for their opinion, please. Maybe take a picture when you do.
posted by gatorae at 2:59 PM on February 24, 2018 [7 favorites]

You almost certainly have an environmental health and safety office

Our campus office is called Risk Management, and that is who I was going to suggest going to for the campus-wide fire safety policies.
posted by Squeak Attack at 4:07 PM on February 24, 2018

Jesus Christ, has anybody called the university's legal office? Because BOY HOWDY does the brain trust in your department who thinks this is a good idea need to have a sit-down with a white-faced attorney shocked at their stupidity and having visions of massive liability.

"I'm just picturing your school's lawyer's face if she or he caught wind of this insanity."

Yes exactly. It's probably the same face I made, and my eyebrows have yet to crawl down out of my hair.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:15 PM on February 24, 2018 [6 favorites]

Hypothetically if a student stayed in an exam while a fire alarm was blaring and then questioned their grade they would surely expect to get some adjustment to their grade based on the “distraction” or “stress” caused by the alarm. I could see that quickly devolving into questions about the consistency of both exams and grading in different sections of the course.
posted by bendy at 4:43 PM on February 24, 2018

Most campuses have an emergency response plan that cover a range of situations beyond fire where campus or building activities would be suspended. Typically within that is a section that provides general information for people with disabilities to consider, including identifying areas of shelter and shelter-in-place options. If this is new information for your department perhaps the faculty senate has it indexed within their minutes or it could be an agenda item.
posted by childofTethys at 5:08 PM on February 24, 2018

I want to point out that while we call it a fire alarm in most large institutions the alarm can be sounded manually by the safety office/security and is often done so for things like explosive gas leak, bomb threat, chemical spill, and other things that poss a hazard but may not have a visible symptom or smell. Waiting to see/smell smoke is not a viable mitigation technique.

It is completely insane not to evacuate a building when one hears a fire alarm. Training people to ignore an active fire alarm also insane.

For risks see the New London School explosion and Lady of Angels fire (which led to a mandate to hold school fire drills).
posted by Mitheral at 8:13 PM on February 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

: " You can't pause and resume without a huge domino effect. "

I totally get this but imagine the domino effect of a couple dozen students dying in a fire.

There is technique used in the workplace here to assess and mitigate risks during work (some version of it is the law in every province of Canada[PDF]). It usually uses a pair of scales to identify unacceptable risk. The systems I've used are graduated from 1 to 5 on both scales. The first scale is likelyhood of an event taking place. The second scale is the severity of the undesired result of a risk. Potential death or losses of large amounts of money or national negative press will individually peg the severity scale and I'm guessing students burning to death after being forced to ignore an evacuation signal would pick up all three. And defying an agreed upon hazard mitigation process would be illegal here at least for the employer and employees.

Some other solution must be put into place when either scale would be at the maximum. Maybe the school could hold a midnight exam session, or scale the marks or give everyone a pass, or make the exam count for 0%, or give the students a take home make up exam. Maybe an impromptu exam room can be set up in the hallways. Or the local elementary school district might rent gyms on a weekend that could be used for a rescheduled exam.
posted by Mitheral at 8:44 PM on February 24, 2018

I totally get this but imagine the domino effect of a couple dozen students dying in a fire.

I am obviously not suggesting that it's ok not to evacuate. Nobody here is, as far as I can tell.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:46 PM on February 24, 2018

Sorry, that was supposed to be a talking point for the OP when hashing this out with the university/professors who would ignore an alarm.
posted by Mitheral at 9:18 PM on February 24, 2018