It’s time for students to start paying attention to the ongoing debate over the choice between semester and quarter systems.

It’s important to consider all possibilities that open up opportunities for students to get the classes they need.

In a quarter system, the academic year would be divided into three or four grading periods rather than two. This can be an advantage for students, giving them an extra chance to boost their GPA, and to try and get into more high demand classes like  English, math, and science.

Whereas the semester system has a full load of 4 to 5 classes, a quarter systems full load is 3 to 4. Three times a year, that small amount of courses can add up, students will go through more classes in a shorter time.

The fast pace quarter system is something that might be a problem. How can students and faculty ever hope to keep up with absorbing all the material in 10 weeks?

Quarters also discourages students from trying to cut class, since missing a class meeting has a bigger impact. Also classes are overflowing within the first weeks of a semester, but drastically empty out as the year progresses.

Those colleges include many in the University of California systems, as well as California State Colleges. That’s only a small sample size of colleges that use the quarter system, and those schools are located here in California.

As previously mentioned, the quarter system has a lower number of classes in a full class load. Fewer classes going at once means that teachers can teach additional specialty classes without being swamped in introductory courses.

Additionally, with three grading periods in a year, over time, this could help colleges recover after this strenuous financial time.

It’s extremely difficult to find anything negative about the quarter system that isn’t worth all of the benefits to the school, students, and staff. Taking three quarters a year over two long semesters is not only an obvious choice for students, but a prudent one.