The Quarter System - 10 Weeks is not 14 Weeks

In large part because of our long history of Cooperative education (CoOp) the Main Campus at Drexel operates on a quarter system - 10 weeks of classes + 1 week of exams.  After the tightest terms, winter and spring, there's one week of break and then you start all over again.  After fall and summer there's close to a month of break.  Note that the fall term courses actually last 11 weeks, but nothing much happens during Thanksgiving week, though Monday and Tuesday are officially class days.

If one comes from a semester system the rhythm of the quarter system is different.  Everything is faster and one has adjustments to make.

Content Adjustment

The tendency is to try and fit a semester's worth of work into 10 weeks.  You're unlikely to succeed if you try that.  Instead you must decide what is essential and what isn't.  Remember on the positive side  that we have about 50% more courses required to graduate than semester schools.

Pace

While this is less tangible, most faculty I've talked to agree that the length of the quarter means that it's more of a challenge to make adjustments, to promote reflection, to achieve that magic "coming together" of ideas that initially seemed unrelated to the students, but are important to the overall understanding of the subject.  It's doable, but planning is important.

Effects on students and classes

We start the fall term late in order to not break over Christmas (some quarter-schools do break then).  We therefore finish the spring quarter much later than Semester schools. This timing has implications as well:

• If you're teaching first-year students they may arrive super-eager or somewhat anxious because their friends have been in school for a month already.
• Conferences scheduled around semester school's calendars can be at awkward times for us (I have one that I attended for the first time on sabbatical because it was always scheduled in the first week of fall-term classes).
• That one-week break after winter and spring terms can seem awfully short.  And of course the longer breaks after fall and summer can be a great relief.

All this can be complicated by our academic rules:

• Students can "drop" or "add" a course during the first two weeks without it showing on their academic record - and do.  You could have a student showing up for the first time 20+% of the way through the course.  You could also have groups carefully formed during the first week disrupted because members disappear.
• Students can and do "withdraw" from a course through the sixth week - it shows on their record.  Again there are implications for group projects.  Note also that it's your responsibility to provide students with adequate feedback before the end of the sixth week so that students can make an informed decision whether or not to withdraw.

Faculty Annual Schedules

The quarter system means that, again due to CoOp, the main campus is a year-round school.  In the summer there are regular classes, with about 60% of the number of students on-campus compared to the other terms.

What this means for faculty is that most departments need courses taught in the summer.  For faculty with a three-quarter contract that can provide opportunities to schedule the quarter break at a different time of year.

Jim Mitchell