A Professor At UCLA Told Her Students To Ignore The Active Shooter Lockdown To Take Their Final Exam

Final exams are the bane of every college student’s existence, almost as much so as what the legal drinking age currently is and the fact that partying for four straight years does not, in fact, prepare you for the real world. Not much can get you out of taking a final aside from a verified death in the family and oh, say maybe…an active shooter on campus.

Yeah, that seems pretty reasonable to me. It does to you, right?

Well it apparently doesn’t to Vivian Lew, a professor at UCLA who emailed her students that despite the campus being on lockdown, they were all still responsible for finishing her final. Specifically, Lew says that she’s locked in her office “and cannot leave; my building is under lockdown” and that students should “leave this area if you are in and find a computer”:

Approximately two hours after her initial email and the end of the first section of her exam, Lew wrote to her students again to tell them that this portion of the exam had been cancelled due to several students who were “too stressed out” to complete the test:

According to Campus Reform, Lew was unaware of the active shooter locker (despite the fact that she mentioned it in her first email) and says that she was “not operation with good information” when she sent the first message:

“When I wrote the first e-mail, I was not operating with good information. I wasn’t aware at the time that some buildings had been locked down, my information was there was ‘police activity,’” she claimed, despite noting in her original email to students that her building was in fact on lockdown.
Lew went on to explain that she was in a meeting at the time and thought the police activity was only a rumor.

“I was in a meeting with two students at that time and I didn’t fully realize what was going on. I had read that it was a rumor,” she remarked, before saying she has “never encountered a situation like this before.

“I am thinking it was a ‘teachable moment’ for me. I’ve never encountered a situation like this before, I don’t recall receiving any training about a shooter or a lockdown when we are not inside a classroom and I didn’t have good information about the severity of the situation,” she said. “I did not react in a wise way and now I am paying the penalty.”(via)

At least one other teacher reportedly refused to cancel their exam as well, with Professor Dahlia Zaidel writing, “I am not cancelling our final. Am not aware of other classes cancelling.”

“Am not aware” indeed.

[H/T Campus Reform & The Tab]