Pages

Friday, March 25, 2016

We give the semester no quarter at UCLA

Cal State joins national trend to switch to 15-week semesters

At Cal State Los Angeles, a mainly commuter campus in the hills east of downtown, the winter quarter is ending – likely forever. The 25,000-student university is joining a Cal State system and national trend to abandon the quarter term calendar, with its three speedy terms a year of 10 weeks each. In its place, it is adopting the less hectic system of two 15-week-long semesters a year...

The Ohio State University system, which enrolls 66,000, switched from quarters to semesters in 2012 after much debate and more than $12 million in costs. Registrar Brad A. Myers said it is not clear whether the change aided a recent 2 percent uptick in freshmen retention rates. Still, he said it appears to bolster learning since “there is a little more time to allow things to sink in.”...

Eight of the University of California’s 10 campuses are quarter holdouts. At UC, where incoming students generally have stronger high school academic records than Cal State students, faculty say quarters allow them to teach more specialized courses and that it is easier for them to take a quarter off for research than to miss an entire semester. Only Berkeley and Merced are on semesters,* and no change is expected at the others, officials say...

Full story at http://edsource.org/2016/cal-state-joins-national-trend-to-switch-to-15-week-long-semesters/561940

*Note: The UCLA Law School is on a semester system.

No comments:

Post a Comment