Quarter system accelerates finals week stress

By Matthew Meyerhofer

The old joke runs that midterm season lasts from week two through week nine at Santa Clara, allowing us to clear all our tattered notes, empty coffee cups, and dried-up high-lighters off our desk, just in time to freak out over impending finals and term papers. Inevitably, by the time we muddle through our last midterm, we have forgotten most of what we learned in the first half of the quarter, so we resign ourselves to another batch of flashcards and study groups, in the hopes that we can somehow recollect facts we had already learned that had since become long-forgotten.

Searching for a scapegoat upon which we can pin our frustrations, we settle on that odd academic arrangement called the quarter system. The quarter system often leaves us feeling a little bit confused over where we stand in the academic year. Like the three periods of hockey, we find the breaks between them not quite long enough to make for a sufficient intermission. Christmas no longer marks a mid-year celebration, but rather an odd "one-third done" break, when our friends on the semester system can gloat about how much further along they are than us, and how much longer they have before returning to school at the end of January. Even the name is misleading. "Quarters" implies four terms, but for the vast majority of us, there are only three terms per year.

But is an extended midterm season and an extra week of finals really all that separates the quarter system from semesters? Is it really worth raising such a fuss for a longer Christmas break and a summer that starts (and ends) later?

Probably. Most of us would appreciate a chance to find a job time at the same time everybody else does in May, rather than waiting an extra month.

However, as I see it, these aren't even the best reasons why Santa Clara should consider a switch. Consider the issue of compatibility (more specifically, how it relates to studying abroad). As we all know, most study abroad programs run on semesters. While taking a fall semester abroad fits nicely into our schedules, studying abroad for a spring semester is unpopular because in doing so, we'd miss both winter and spring quarter. So right off the bat, your study abroad options are cut in half if you're planning on spending at least part of your year at Santa Clara.

The problems with this go even further. Because people prefer to go abroad during fall of their junior year, combined with the fact that off-campus housing generally ends up being a full year commitment, many students end up scrambling to find subleasers during that quarter (which ultimately creates a glut in the housing market). If Santa Clara were on a semester system, there would probably be a much more equitable availability of housing in both fall and spring. Consequently, people would have an easier time finding subleasers in the fall, and an easier time finding housing in the spring. Students who are discouraged from studying abroad because of housing complications wouldn't ever run into these problems.

Also, those students who are looking to convert their study at courses elsewhere into meaningful credits at Santa Clara would do well if we converted to semesters. Consider a student who takes a semester of language classes at a school abroad, or at home during the summer. Where do you go after taking a semester of Spanish? You could either sacrifice the last part of your semester's worth of learning and go into Spanish 2, or perhaps if you were particularly ambitious you would try to jump right into Spanish 3. Or maybe you'd just forgo studying that subject, which would just be another case of the quarter-semester incompatibility getting in the way of learning.

Also, my guess is that the fall sports teams wouldn't mind a switch to the semester system. Getting here a month before everyone else must make summer seem awfully short.

No doubt the administration has reasons for keeping us on the quarter system, and they're probably economic ones. A switch from quarters to semesters would require each department to restructure its requirements for the major. It would require a comprehensive re-evaluation of the entire Core curriculum, a complete reworking of the academic calendar, and much, much more.

Right now, the last major bastion of quarter schools is the University of California, and even in that case, the most prestigious of the schools (Berkeley) is on semesters. If the UC system switches to semesters, Santa Clara will become part of a small minority clinging to quarters. If quarters do indeed become that uncommon, I suspect that it could even deter prospective students from considering attending the university.

Until that time when (and if) Santa Clara does switch, however, we can continue to look forward to midterms just days before our finals. At the very least though, we can appreciate one advantage quarters have over semesters: an extra round of end-of-the-term parties.

Matt Meyerhofer is a sophomore English and philosophy major. A news staff writer, he can be contacted at (408) 554-4852 or mmeyerhofer@scu.edu.