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[Phys-L] academic term systems



On 03/03/2018 10:41 AM, John Sohl wrote:

Weber State U. admin has done something similar to us. We started with
10-week quarters, then because a large private university down the road was
on semesters it was decided that we had to be on semesters too. (It was a
bit more complicated than that, but that was a driving factor.) That
changed us to two 15-week semesters.

30 weeks per academic year for both, sounds good. But, a 5-hr single-term
course (5 hr times 10 weeks = 50 contact hours) became a 3-hr single-term
course (3 * 15 is 45 contact hours) which was a 10% loss for courses like
PHYS 1010 and astronomy, etc.

Then, some genius in admin decided that we were not utilizing our
facilities well during the summer semester. Clearly it couldn't be the
obvious thing that students don't really want to take classes in the
summer, it must be caused by the summer semester being compressed. (We had
various models for class length for the shorter term, but it still came out
to about 45 contact hours.) So they then foisted upon us a system with
three identical terms. For this to work with semester breaks, exam weeks,
spring (one-week) and (one-day) fall breaks, etc. they shorted all the
semesters.

That's a depressing story.

IMHO they should have just stuck with the quarter system.
Of course they'll never go back to that, because that
would be tantamount to admitting they made a mistake.

The quarter system has been around for nearly 1000 years.
It aligns nicely with established holidays.

The phase-locking argument carries some weight, but the
direction is open to dispute. If the university down
the road is on the semester system, maybe *they* should
be the ones to change.