Almost 100 juniors in Civil Engineering 270 decided to skip their final exam.

Their professor loved the idea.

Instead of taking a traditional written final exam, Jack Matson's students voted to either spend a Saturday cleaning up a trail at Shavers' Creek Environmental Center or planting trees at Tudek Park or at Sproul State Forest in Clinton County.

Last Saturday, roughly forty students from the environmental engineering class planted 500 trees at Tudek Park. Ferguson Township recently made the vacant lot near the Last Cowboy Restaurant and Lounge, 1521 Martin St., a community park.

Tim Skone (senior-chemical engineering), one student who helped organize the class's participation in the projects, said because forty students worked at Tudek Park, they finished the project in four hours.

The Tudek Park planting organizers for the township had fewer volunteers before Matson's students offered to work and predicted the task would take one and a half days.

On Saturday, most of the remaining students will participate in cleaning a trail at Shaver's Creek and plant more trees in Clinton County. The Clinton County replanting follows the April 28, 1990 forest fire that destroyed about 4,000 acres.

Matson said each project provides the students with a learning experience because University forestry professors explain the project to students as they work.

The idea to substitute the projects for a 150-question final exam came from a weekly questionnaire distributed in Matson's class. One respondent asked how Matson would react if the entire class boycotted the final exam. Tom Long, a student on Matson's quality committee that reads the questionnaires, posed the question to Matson after the committee's weekly meeting.

Long said he and the others on the quality committee argued to Matson that the projects would relate directly to the work the students had done all semester.

"This is another way to be creative," said Long (junior-chemical engineering).

Matson replied that students would need to organize two or three projects as alternatives to the final by April 23 and show that 90 percent of the class was interested in them. The next day in class, the students had selected the projects and voted to substitute them for the final exam almost unanimously.

"I've never seen a class congeal so quickly," Matson said.

Matson monitors the attendance for the projects closely and attends the sites himself. Students who do not work on one of the three projects must take an oral final exam instead.

"As it stands, I think I'll be giving two or three oral finals," Matson said, adding that the people who opted for the exam are athletes with track meets on both Saturdays.

Matson said the environmental projects are exciting enough that they could be made a permanent part of the class if future classes want to organize projects.