Instead of packing up and heading out for the winter, students only have a short hiatus until they return for finals due to the semester term system.
Students are preparing for a five-day Thanksgiving break instead of packing for a 40-day winter vacation due to Ohio University’s 2012 switch from quarters to semesters.
In the last year of the quarters system, the last day of fall term was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and classes resumed the first Tuesday in January. There were no classes during the month of December.
Ohio University President Roderick McDavis proposed the switch to semesters in June 2008 at a Board of Trustees meeting, following an Ohio Board of Regents push for a common academic calendar among all public universities. OU then was one of four public universities in the state operating under quarters.
“Although future students of the university will not enjoy the advantages of shorter periods of instruction or a long winter break, they will have opportunities that current Ohio University students do not have ... ” reads a quarters-to-semesters information page posted on Ohio University’s website.
Some of the supposed benefits OU administrators cited in that page were additional class time, the chance to be more competitive for internships because of an earlier end to the academic year and a greater ease of transfer between institutions, as most U.S. colleges were already using semesters.
{{tncms-asset app="editorial" id="b0119528-7e84-11e5-9d8a-172766c2f709"}}
“It will be a change of pace in student life,” Ryan Lombardi, then dean of students, said of the transition in a previous Post report.
Before the transition was approved by the BOT, a committee, dubbed “The Quarters to Semesters Transition Team” was already forming plans to help departments and schools adjust their curriculum for a decrease in required credit hours from 192 hours to 120 hours.
Some faculty and students did not initially favor the switch, and in a 1997 survey, voiced their concerns about having class during the month of December.
“(The faculty) really appreciate that time to catch up on work. It’s a great boon to them,” former Ohio University President Robert Glidden said of the survey results in a previous Post report.
More than a decade later, in 2010, students weighed the pros and cons of a transition that was already in the planning stages.
“I mean, quarters are nice because after you end one, you get a break and on semesters you have work to do through Thanksgiving,” said Bryan Morton, a junior studying finance, in a previous Post report. “But everything is really rushed in the classroom on quarters."
Now that many of the OU students who had a full academic year of quarters have graduated, those still studying here say they're used to semesters and prefer them to quarters.
“I like (semesters) because you get a mental break for Thanksgiving and then come back and then take finals," Mikala Perry, a sophomore studying nursing, said this fall. "I’d rather have a longer summer.”
Elsa Kuhn, a sophomore studying nursing, told The Post this fall that she did post-secondary at Ohio State University when it had quarters.
“I didn’t really like it," Kuhn said. "I just didn’t like how short the classes were. I like the semesters.”
–Megan Henry contributed to this report.
