Talk:Academic term

Merger of Academic year with this article

I merged Academic term and Academic year, per the request for merge 'tag' on the article. It's a bit awkward where it is sitting at the moment. It might look better further down the page. I'm curious whether its good practice to use a redirect to point to a subsection. If that was the case the redirect from Academic year could point straight to the subsection Academic year. --Randolph 21:28, 2 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It has been suggested to merge Year-Round School with Academic year. This would be extremely inappropriate as year-round school is the rearranging of existing components of the academic year, not the definition of them. WesWalker 03:32, 29 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Semesters and quarters

I'm not really clear on what is being discussed in this article. Are we talking about colleges and universities only (i.e. post-secondary institutions), or do elementary and secondary schools count? In my personal experience, most public elementray schools in the U.S. have two semesters, each divided into two quarters (which are quite different from the post-secondary quarters which are really a third of the regular school year). Is this some peculiarity of my state, or am I misunderstanding the article, or is it just incomplete? -Aranel ("Sarah") 21:13, 9 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A Question

I am looking for information on a specific topic--if this is the right article for it to be in, I hope someone could edit it to include the information I'm looking for. If not, I hope they could direct me to the appropriate article. I would like to know if there is a general standard by which colleges and universities decide how far into a semester they will allow students to drop a class. My local college has a 15 week semester. During the first week, classes can be dropped without either academic or financial penalty. Thereafter, classes can be dropped for an additional nine weeks, but with both an academic penalty (i.e., one's records show that the student withdrew from the class) and a financial penalty (i.e. one must still pay for the credit hours even though those credit hours will not be received). After ten weeks, the student is bound to remain in the class, even if he is failing. Is this typical for most colleges or not? And on a similar note, I have heard that in Japan, if one does not show up for the final exam, he is considered to have dropped the class--thus, no one ever fails a university course in Japan. Is this true? --GnatsFriend

In the US, each college and university has almost complete freedom to do whatever it likes, resulting in a huge variety of practices. At some colleges, you can even choose which courses will appear on your transcript, as long as the ones that remain give you enough credits. I don't know the situation in Japan, but in much of Europe, the notion is that the only purpose of coursework is to prepare you for the exam: the exam is the entire grade. Practices vary by country. I would guess there are countries where you can take the exam as many times as you want, and not even have to register in advance. But I'm afraid that won't convince anyone at your college to change its practices (unless of course there are legal or regulatory issues). --Macrakis 14:34, 3 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Corrected etymology

I assume the words semester and trimester were mistaken for divisions of a year, but -mester refers to a length of time equal to a month, and tri- and se- are multipliers, not divisors (e.g. tricycle--three wheels).

Etymology etc

This is a tricky page to edit, due to sometimes arcane terminology, and widely differing practice, with most individuals being aware only of one system. I've tidied up the introduction which had some statements which while true in certain places, are not true generally; I've indicated the etymology of semester and trimester, which so often confuse; and I've added a history section, originally to clarify etymology, but in the end just for interest's sake! – CDV 12:42, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Updates

This page should not be merged with Year-round education. Year-round education is more than just an academic-term - it is an entire schema set up to increase student-throughput and appropriate funding in areas of rapid growth. I will make some major contributions to this article, including grabbing a snapshot of the Warning - School Pedestrians - Year Round Operations from a local elementary school up the road. I will also put in some explanations of the 'big-picture' of year-round education, from a demographics and funding standpoint. In the mean-time, you can see Green Hope High School (Funding section) for some information on North Carolina's educational situation. 24.211.161.77 02:40, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]