I’m not a huge fan of the quarter system. Doing my undergraduate work at Iowa State and having 15 weeks for a semester acclimated me to a longer term with more depth and more time for final projects. A 10 week quarter just doesn’t cut it; I don’t feel like we can go into as much in-depth in this period of time.
It’s already week 8, so we only have two more weeks after this one is over (and one of them has Thanksgiving, so not even two whole weeks). Last week was the last week students could drop the class, and I checked this morning to see if anyone had. This is the first time I had checked the list since the second week of the term, so I was shocked to see that someone who hadn’t shown up since October 15 hadn’t dropped. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I have only two withdrawals out of four classes of 26 to 27 students each. Wow.
I sympathize. I went from a 16-week semester at the University of Colorado-Boulder to a 10-week quarter when I did my MA at Portland State. I never got used to it either.