quarters (tech).
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Okay, this is me getting up on my soap box.
During my eleven years of higher education, I attended four different schools on three different academic calendar systems (quarters, semesters, and trimesters, which were a hybrid of the two). Georgia Tech was on the quarter system, and I have to say I think it was one of Tech’s strengths. First of all, the quarter system just makes sense: dividing the year into equal chunks makes the summer term a legitimate term rather than just a chance to get that annoying general-ed requirement out of the way with a slack instructor. Tech was also cool in that every required class for every major was taught every quarter, so you weren’t tied to the traditional academic year. If you had a hiccup due to life issues, or you wanted to pursue a nontraditional academic path (like, say, spending a semester in Japan even though you were a physics and engineering major), you could stay on track without having to wait until the next September to re-synchronize. The quarter system was also ideal for the co-op program, which was another one of Tech’s strong points. But I think some of the best things about quarters went unappreciated. For example, students at schools on quarters take about fifty percent more individual courses than students at semester schools, even though the total effective credit hours are about the same. One consequence is that a student’s GPA is a better representation of his/her actual abilities (more sampling points), and any one inept jerk professor with a grudge or a chip on his shoulder (are you still out there, Gunther Meyer?) has a harder time doing a hatchet job on your GPA to keep you out of grad school and ruin the rest of your life. Another consequence is that quarters provide more flexibility in what courses can be offered. For example, my graduate department at Tech was able to offer nonlinear optics (an esoteric graduate-level course) every year on the quarter system, but only every other year on the semester system, solely because on semesters they couldn’t guarantee the minimum enrollment every year. You can argue that you can’t teach a class like nonlinear optics (or emag, or calculus) in ten weeks, but duh! on quarters you can break it up into a sequence of two or more courses taken in series. People complained that the quarter system was more of a grind, because every ten weeks it was time to take finals again, but I think it was for the best. First, it instilled the culture of hard work for which Tech is (was?) known. Second, it forced professors to stay on track. In every term, no matter how long, there comes a point where the professor realizes holy crap! he can’t slip behind any more lectures because he’s got a final coming up in four weeks and he’s still got X more chapters to cover; a professor can get a lot farther behind in a semester than in a quarter. Students will bellyache (that’s what spoiled, entitled brats do), but they’ll also cover more material. The end result is that students on quarters probably work harder on average and come away having learned more. That was my experience, anyway. A couple of years before I finished grad school, the Georgia Board of Regents made the executive decision to inflict semesters on every public school in the state. The ostensive reason was that they wanted to synchronize all the state schools on a common schedule to make it easier for students to take courses at multiple schools and move around within the system. Okay, fair enough, an admirable goal. But they chose to go with semesters rather than quarters, supposedly because the law school at the University (sic) of Georgia was on semesters, and couldn’t possibly change, because law schools have to be on semesters. Oh. Well, okay, as long as the lawyers are happy. There were other reasons given, and they were even more lame. “Three terms a year instead of four reduces administrative overhead.” So, screw the students out of part of their education, reduce your costs, and charge them the same tuition. Yeah, actually that does sound a lot like Tech (where the unofficial student mascot is The Shaft). By the way, I’m sure that’s why the entire business world is on the verge of abandoning that costly quarter system once and for all, to minimize administrative overhead. Then there’s my favorite reason: “All the good schools are on semesters.” Huh…I guess Stanford and CalTech don't count. So, if Harvard and MIT jumped in a lake, I suppose Tech would, too? I’m proud to say that while I was there in grad school, Georgia Tech finally clawed its way into the top five US engineering schools in the US World News annual rankings (not that anyone pays any attention or thinks those numbers mean anything…ha!). However, I really have a hard time believing that Tech has anywhere to go but down. As great a leader as the current president has been, Tech is at the point where the few schools with higher rankings are the ones with the big names that are untouchable. And honestly, on the semester system I think Tech is losing its edge. Maybe I’m just bitter because I had to take three whole quarters of emag and now they only require one semester. I’ll tell you, they’re letting the kids at Tech get soft…why, when I was student there, we didn't have on-line journals...I had to walk all the way up the hill to the library to get my journal articles. In the snow… |