It’s time for UCLA to improve the education of its
students by making a change from the quarter system to
semesters.
The quarter system, widely used across the University of
California and seldom outside it, often causes a semester’s
worth of content to be condensed into a ten-week quarter. The
result is an education filled with facts but lacking in
understanding, and a student body scarcely involved outside the
classroom.
The semester system would give students more time to participate
in student groups, athletics, community service and other
extracurricular activities. The quarter system burdens its students
with so many assignments and tests in such a short time period
there is little time left over for active or significant student
involvement without jeopardizing grade point averages.
Because it keeps students from becoming involved with their
communities, the quarter system is partially to blame for the
degree mill UCLA has become. Many students gain little more from
their time at UCLA than textbook memorization, instead of the
critical analysis, application and social skills that will prove
more useful in the real world. Professors, too, have to compact
their lesson plans because of time constraints, where they could
help students explore issues and consider theories in more
depth.
The quarter system even interferes with students’ summers:
by the time school ends, many internships and jobs have already
been taken, making them inaccessible to UCLA students. For example,
Berkeley students and Trojans can start internships when they get
out of school May 24 and 13, respectively. Bruins, on the other
hand, won’t be able to start until a month after, when they
finish finals on June 13.
The textbooks courses are based on are almost all written for
schools on the semester system, and it puts an unfair burden on
UCLA students. Because of this, students often do the same amount
of work as their counterparts in the semester system in two-thirds
the time.
While some may argue squeezing in one more quarter’s worth
of classes provides for a well-rounded education, it’s
usually counterproductive because it leads to students cramming and
pulling all nighters late in the quarter to prepare for finals in
classes of little value to them. Most of the material that is
“learned” in this way is forgotten shortly after the
quarter ends. If students aren’t going to retain any of the
subject matter in the first place, taking additional classes
isn’t exactly beneficial.
Students in the quarter system may indeed be more
“well-rounded,” but their spheres of knowledge will be
significantly smaller than students highly specialized in one or
two fields at other institutions.
The quarter versus semester debate boils down to quantity versus
quality. While the quarter system allows students to take a whole
lot of classes, they typically don’t gain as much from those
classes as they could under the semester system. The semester
system provides time for students and professors to explore topics
and gain an understanding that goes beyond the facts to a
subject’s underlying themes.
The quarter system is inefficient because it expects students to
learn more than is feasible ““ which is probably the reason
why few colleges use it.