For whatever reason, the quarter system has found a long-standing home, integrating itself into the academic foundation of UCSD.
Arriving at college, we are rarely inspired to ask about the reasons behind the implementation of such a system, but perhaps those questions are long overdue and yearn to surface.
As a Revelle sophomore, my experiences have already driven me to my knees with one fist aimed at the sky, crying bitterly, “”God, oh God! What is wrong with me? Why am I forever doomed toward failure in my chem classes?!””
Well, perhaps I threw in a bit of exaggeration, but I’m sure you can relate to this feeling of distress. The conclusion I finally reached is this: I loathe the quarter system.
Let us begin by examining the quality of our education under the quarter system.
This 11-week journey rushes us through a tornado of classes, labs, exams and dizzying amounts of reading.
Throughout this journey it’s not uncommon to find classes proceeding at a rate of one or perhaps two chapters a week.
Because a 50-minute class period is obviously too short an amount of time for the professor to impart all of the essentially profound wisdom of physics, students resort to reading textbooks late into the night.
If the textbooks we buy really say it all, then why go to class?
This rebellious question does offer very practical implications; I confess that I developed a secret habit of averting class, though I am currently in recovery.
Though these endeavors were more out of sheer laziness than to prove a point, I inadvertently stumbled upon a shocking discovery — it can be done.
Classes could be passed without attending lectures, or in other words, I found lectures a bore and quite unnecessary.
What my experiences led me to was this: Because of the expediency of the quarter system, in some cases, the quality of classes (and the necessity of them) falls short of the standards we should expect from an esteemed university.
It isn’t that the quarter system is entirely ineffective.
If the purpose of such a system is to educate, then to a certain degree the quarter system has done so.
Though many students feel that classes proceed at highly accelerated rates, adaptation to this is possible.
For these reasons, we fall into complacency, blaming other factors instead of the quarter system for our academic struggles and failures.
However, the challenge we face is to ask ourselves, “”Do we deserve better out of the university?””
Practical alternatives, such as the widely used semester system, prove to be effective competitors of the quarter system.
The renovation of the academic foundation of this university has been long overdue, and perhaps now its time has come.
