The Quarter System

[astroyogi]

Hi there, I'm a prospective grad interested in a Physics PhD program at a school that operates under the quarter system. At this point after four years I've been so submersed in the flow of the semester system, it's difficult for me to picture the quarter system.

 

I was wondering if anyone could give me any feedback about how they like taking classes and TAing within the quarter system. Ups, downs? Any comment would be useful for this curious prospie. Thanks!

[Maleficent999]

Hi there, I'm a prospective grad interested in a Physics PhD program at a school that operates under the quarter system. At this point after four years I've been so submersed in the flow of the semester system, it's difficult for me to picture the quarter system.

 

I was wondering if anyone could give me any feedback about how they like taking classes and TAing within the quarter system. Ups, downs? Any comment would be useful for this curious prospie. Thanks!

I haven't experienced the quarter system as a grad student (I will beginning in the Fall), but I did experience both the quarter and semester system as an undergrad. I transferred from a community college that operated under the semester system to a degree-granting institution that used quarters. It took a little adjusting at first, but I ended up liking it better. Things move much faster on the quarter system, which I liked because I'm a fast learner and under the semester system I got really bored with how slowly we got through the material. I had to make sure to pay attention all of the time instead of zoning out once I understood the material, but I don't like being somewhere if I'm not engaged so I prefer this. I've heard some professors say they don't like the quarter system because they don't get to teach everything about a topic that they would like, but personally I found that I learned a lot better with quarters, likely because I was more engaged (out of necessity). I have no idea what we did for 20+ weeks in one class with semesters now! 10-12 weeks is just the right amount of time to submerse myself in a topic in order to understand it and not get bored. If you (or a student) are struggling with the material, it certainly give you less time to realize it. With semesters, there was a lot more time to redeem yourself if you messed up a test or something but once I realized there wasn't that option with quarters, it definitely motivated me to pay attention more closely and utilize office hours. Overall, I think it is more efficient. I got to take a larger array of classes than I would have on the semester system and as someone that really enjoys learning, I appreciated this.

 

So to sum up: Quarters mean you have to teach the material more quickly and be selective with what you include in your lessons. Some students may struggle with the pace, but I think if you emphasize not waiting until there is an issue to ask for help and encourage them to utilize office hours, it should be fine.

[TakeruK]

I had 12-13 week semesters (2 semesters/year) in undergrad/MSc and 10 week quarters (3 quarters/year) in grad school. It's different and like you would expect, the term goes by a lot faster. I won't be TAing under this semester until next quarter though, so I can't say much more about TAing.

 

Here are my thoughts.

 

Pros:

 

1. Shorter terms means classes are more focussed and specialized. I feel that profs realise their limitations and make a real effort to actually complete the material on time and plan each week's material carefully. In the semester system, we often would only get through 80% of our syllabus. 

 

2. More quarters = more variety in classes. Combined with more specialized classes, this gives you a much better selection of what classes you want to take and what topics you want to learn. Something that might be 2 semesters long would likely be 3 quarter classes and you can sometimes choose to only take the 2 quarters that you're interested in. For example, the "Astronomical Instrumentation" class at my current school is split into 3 quarters that cover different parts of the EM spectrum. I can take only the quarters that cover optical and IR (what I use) and not have to learn about radio telescopes or X-ray/gamma ray telescopes.

 

3. Classes end faster! Learning is fun but when you are feeling pressure to produce research, having everything end in 10 weeks lets you get caught up in research again faster. We have breaks between every quarter which are great for this.

 

4. If you fall behind and end up having to cram for a final, you have less material to have to cram.

 

5. The quarter system allowed me to get all my course requirements finished in 4 quarters (1.3 years) instead of 4 semesters which would be 2.0 years.

 

Cons:

 

1. If you miss a week of a quarter for a conference, this is already 10% of the quarter! But see Pro #4 above too.

 

2. If the TAs are slow at returning marked work, you might not get your first problem sets back by the time week 4/5 (i.e. midterms) roll around. Most TAs are good at doing their best to get stuff back to you before a midterm though.

 

3. If you are ordering your textbooks from a slow source (i.e. not Amazon Prime), you might be 2-3 weeks (=25%) into your quarter before you have your materials. You can mitigate these effects by using the library reserve though.

 

Overall, the quarter system was new and a big change. Maybe not as much for me as my American semester friends since it seems like US semesters are 16 weeks but Canadian semesters are either 12 or 13 weeks. I think I would prefer the quarter system for graduate school but the semester system for undergraduate work. 

[Queen of Kale]

I've been used to semesters all my life and I think the quarter system is wonderful for TAing but a little less wonderful for being a student.  Because of the intensity of the coursework it's hard to pace my research except it fits and spurts.  I'm more of a slow & steady wins the race sort of person.  But, I think I also tend to be over ambitious with the coursework.  Our coursework requirements are minimal but I have so many courses I want to take & yet I see that the students a year ahead of me have learned to pace themselves more.  That might be the secret of the quarter system.  

[astroyogi]

Thank you all so much! On average, how many graduate courses do you take in one quarter? And, is there any difference from the whole "three hours studying for every credit hour spent in class" rule for undergraduates?

[zipykido]

Thank you all so much! On average, how many graduate courses do you take in one quarter? And, is there any difference from the whole "three hours studying for every credit hour spent in class" rule for undergraduates?

 

It would depend on your program, my program requires 8-10 classes + seminars and some research before your 6th semester, so I'm taking between 1-2 classes per semester plus seminars. I wouldn't say there is a strict rule in terms of much time you spend on classes. Most classes I am taking are refreshers of stuff I've already done in lab or in undergraduate classes so I can spend less time on those while other classes have problem sets that take a long time no matter how much schooling you've had. The thing I hate about the quarter system is that things pile on really fast considering that semesters are only 10 weeks, so you'll have lulls in some weeks and a ton of stuff to do in addition to research the next week.

[TakeruK]

Thank you all so much! On average, how many graduate courses do you take in one quarter? And, is there any difference from the whole "three hours studying for every credit hour spent in class" rule for undergraduates?

 

Most students in my program take on average 3 classes per quarter and it's the standard expected courseload (sometimes 4 or sometimes 2 though). It's hard to take less than 2 because of the required classes and taking more than 4 would usually raise concerns from advisors about time for research. My school lists the number of credit hours as the "total number of time expected for this class", and most courses are 9 credits (3 in class, 6 for reading+homework) or 12 credits if there are a lot of labs required. So not quite the "3 hours studying for every hour spent in class". These guidelines are ill-defined though--it's not clear if they are supposed to represent a minimum to pass, or the expected hours for a satisfactory grade (and also not clear what this is). And, a lot of profs don't really take into account these hours. We might be told to spend X hours on a project when X is not a reasonable number considering we have 60 hours total after accounting for 30 hours in lectures.

 

However, from the campus wide surveys, one of the main questions is something about how many hours we spent on course material compared to the number of credits listed and the majority of the surveys show that students do spend about the right amount of listed hours. For me, I could spend 3 hours studying for every 1 hour in class, but I think I would prefer to use my time in research and I basically follow a law of diminishing returns. I find that spending 5 hours on a problem set is very much better than 2 hours, but there's very little difference in 8 hours vs 5 hours, so I just spend 5 hours. I think managing our internal perfectionist is very important for time management in research heavy graduate programs. 

 

Here, I can give you an example related to our fields. In our program, we are often encouraged to take shortcuts in our problem sets. e.g. if we are numerically integrating something, a rectangle rule will often yield an answer that is good enough and it's super intuitive, while I would probably have to spend 10-15 minutes extra just to look up the coefficients for and properly write code to do Simpson's Rule or Trapezoid rule etc. Or, I can just use order of magnitude values such as 3g/cc for basaltic rock density instead of looking up the precise value for whatever temperature and pressure it is on Mars. Our course TAs and instructors generally have the view that getting computations exact to better than 10% or 20% is not really learning any more geology/physics/astronomy but it takes a lot more time. Of course, there are certain exceptions where you do want to get an exact answer. But outside of these circumstances, this is what I mean by not being a perfectionist. It works better when TAs mark with this philosophy too though--often an order of magnitude estimate gets graded the same as an exact answer, or the difference is a 95% instead of 100% (i.e. none).

 

Finally, I should note that if you consider time studying for comps and quals, it's very likely graduate students will spend more than 3 hours studying for every hour spent in class! I'm just talking about the time spent on a class while you are taking it, here, because the amount of prep you need for quals/comps will vary a lot from person to person!

 

PS: These are great questions to ask to the graduate students at the specific program you are interested in! I'd recommend talking to students about how many classes / how much time on classes when you visit them. Many of them probably come from non-quarter systems and will have a lot of specific and relevant information that will relate to you

Edited February 18, 2014 by TakeruK

[seeingeyeduck]

As a student I really hated quarters. There're always tests. For STEM classes there was a midterm and for humanities courses there was always a paper every 2-3 weeks and you had no breathing room at all. People who want to cram a lot into their degree like it for the variety but I hated it since I like to let things sink in and think about things. Maybe I'd be able to write a better paper if I had more than a week or two to consider what I wanted to say! If you get the flu bad, you are so screwed and I saw a lot of TAs deal with extensions under extenuating circumstances. But who knows, maybe students are just as bad under semesters! It just seemed like by the time you got your work graded and returned, it was only a week away from another test or paper! I can't imagine the TAs liked grading constantly...

I'm hoping grad school will include a lot more independent study time. That's just my personality though.

[TakeruK]

As a student I really hated quarters. There're always tests. For STEM classes there was a midterm and for humanities courses there was always a paper every 2-3 weeks and you had no breathing room at all. People who want to cram a lot into their degree like it for the variety but I hated it since I like to let things sink in and think about things. Maybe I'd be able to write a better paper if I had more than a week or two to consider what I wanted to say! If you get the flu bad, you are so screwed and I saw a lot of TAs deal with extensions under extenuating circumstances. But who knows, maybe students are just as bad under semesters! It just seemed like by the time you got your work graded and returned, it was only a week away from another test or paper! I can't imagine the TAs liked grading constantly...

I'm hoping grad school will include a lot more independent study time. That's just my personality though.

 

I think quarters in grad school is a lot different from quarters in undergrad. At my grad program, we rarely have midterms and only about half of my classes have finals (the rest just have projects). But in my STEM classes, in both grad and undergrad, we almost always had a regular assignment schedule, e.g. weekly work due on Fridays, as soon as we hand one in, we get another. This was true for both quarters and semester programs!

 

To me, the difference is that you spend a lot less time in classes in grad school than undergrad, so that makes the biggest difference in increasing independent study time!

[roguesenna]

I had quarters in grad school and my MFA. the last time I had semesters was in high school and i can't possibly fathom why someone would prefer them. Obviously, I'm a little biased, but I loved the fast pace of quarters for all the reasons listed above. More variety of classes, they're over faster if you don't like them for whatever reason, etc. I also think that the quarter system really forces students (and profs I would guess) to produce material quickly, reliably and on a deadline. It took me a long time to learn that school and it's truly invaluable to have.

 

As far as TA advice, I'd say if you are designing assignments, make them manageable time-wise. Both for students to complete and for you to grade. Grade as quickly as possible, because other posters are right, not getting any feedback til half-way through the quarter sucks. I also think correspondance between students and TAs or Profs before the quarter starts can be really helpful. Order books early, like someone else said. Don't waste the first and last classes on typical first day/last day stuff. If your class meets twice a week, you only have 20 sessions. Make em count!