Semesters: more of my opinion

["Rauber, Joel Phys" <RAUBERJ@mg.sdstate.edu>]

Mark wrote:


>    There is a difference though.  By spreading it over three
> semesters, there is a better chance that the average student will actually
> learn some of the material.

I'm not so sure I agree.  The student has more time for the course, but they 
are typically taking 5-6 courses simultaneously rather than 3 (what I had 
for our standard quarter load).  So the semester student is spread quite 
thin,  rarely do they have a week without some test or paper due; it seems 
that they spend their time putting out fires.  This of course gets down to 
personal opinion, but I felt I learned more effectively  under the quarter 
system; mostly because I could concentrate on few subjects at a time.

Also, those semesters are so damn interminably long.  You get more fresh 
starts in the quarter, something I enjoyed as a student.

Roger noted:

> Joel, I was going on weeks based on three 50 min. lecture periods per week.
> Under that system 1 sem. hr. credit transfers as 1.5 quarter hrs. of credit
> at the places that I am acquainted with

Here we have three 50 min lectures a week under the semester system, but we 
start in early september and we get 41 or 42 lectures total.  the quarter 
system school I went to had four 50 minute lectures a week for ten weeks = 
40 lectures.  These numbers are for the standard courses, I've ignored the 
extra semester hour our students get for the laboratory portion of the 
course.  Perhaps we are an extreme case, but even in the school I got my 
Ph.D from (semesters) which started in late August, you couldn't cover the 
same material in a year.  I admit that if our introductory sequence were 3 
semesters as is the case at many schools, my arguement wouldn't apply.

Joel