Only one public university in the state of Washington compels students into a semester-based academic calendar. Even every community college in the Evergreen state employs the quarter system. WSU would be better off to follow suit.

A quarter system authorizes students to better concentrate their attention toward their classes. In semester systems, students can drown in exhaustively long courses piled simultaneously on top of each other for nearly half a year. In a quarter setup, students can focus on three or four courses in a period of 10 weeks. Comparatively, semester-based students enroll into five or six classes for a full 15 weeks.

The semester system is a vocal concern to many incoming Cougs and their families.

“Parents often ask questions about how their children are supposed to balance more classes over a longer period of time,” said Kai Amos, parent orientation counselor (POC) and member of Student Media.

The drawn-out nature of the semester system can spark severe consequences. One of the most urgent areas of overhaul that WSU must be desperate to mend is our graduation rate. According to WSU’s 2016-2017 reports, a shocking one-third of Cougs graduate within four years.

This illustrates a problematic feature of the semester structure. A student’s four-year plan can crumble for struggling with just a single class within the all-or-nothing semester system. This predicament can become a nightmare for students who struggle with a particular course that serves as a prerequisite for required courses higher within a major.

Playing catch-up can swiftly perpetuate even further. Each semester burdens its weight to an eighth of a student’s four-year plan. Alternatively, each quarter in a regular three-quarter academic year (with summer reserved as the optional fourth quarter) stocks itself to a 12th of the same length of enrollment. The fundamental discrepancy between the two types of academic terms is that quarters are more versatile.

The common theme of quarter systems at every community college in the state means transfer students have an off-beat experience when enrolling at WSU. Washingtonians are increasingly studying at community colleges for two years before transferring into four-year institutions like WSU. Standardizing our academic calendar would in effect ease the transition for incoming transfer students.

“One quarter does not equal one semester of credits in the sciences,” said Waylon Safranski, the assistant director of the Transfer Clearinghouse. “We recommend future transfer students to enroll into three quarters of a specific science course at their community college so we can convert those credits into the two semesters they’re worth.”

Growth is a principal part of an education’s value. What the debate between these two systems boils down to is that the flexibility of quarters permits an education to build off itself. Consequently, majors that are contingent on prerequisite courses stand to gain plenty from the quarter-based system.

Classes with distinctly heavy workloads can avoid cramming into a single term as well. A demanding class in a quarter system carries the ability to divide itself into multiple sequences. For example, a student could study Part 1 of the Introduction to Chemistry in the fall quarter and continue onto Part 2 in the winter. However, if a student struggled with the foundations of chemistry taught in Part 1, they could retake the course to assert their comprehension before progressing onto the next sequence.

Nothing sculpts a university’s infrastructure more than its academic calendar. A quarter system promotes schedule adaptability, more progressive educational build-up, and tunes the university with the rest of the public state colleges we consistently interact with.