>To my eye that's basically a lot of crush education time (32 out of 36
>weeks?) and then 16 straight weeks of summer vacation (not quite
>enough time to fit a nominal E and F terms); but is that correct? Yes. It's based on the real WPI's calendar, which is unusual by the standards of American universities. Most US colleges and universities operate on a semester system. At the University of Maine, for instance, there are two 16-week semesters per academic year, one starting the week before Labor Day (which is the first Monday in September in the US), the other in the third week of January. (There are also completely optional classes offered during the winter and summer breaks, but those are outside the scope of the discussion.)
At WPI, they run on a schedule more akin to that used by most public* elementary, middle, and high schools in the US, which divide the fall and spring semesters into two terms each. In K–12, at least where I went to school, they were numbered quarters, but at WPI they're terms A through D. There's also an optional E term in the summer. Each term at WPI is seven weeks long, but the classes meet for an hour each weekday--as opposed to undergraduate classes at UMaine, say, which meet in a few different formats that all add up to three contact hours per week.
WPI's seven-week terms are a high-compression academic environment, because there is very little margin for error built into such a schedule. If you get sick and miss a week's worth of classes at a normal university, you're out three class hours of the nominal 48 there will be that semester, which is 6ΒΌ percent of the available class time. At WPI, with the same length absence, you've missed more than twice as much class time: five hours out of 35, or slightly more than 14 percent. And that's only for one course; if you're a full-time student, you'll be carrying at least three. It's very difficult to come back from any significant stumble under such an unforgiving calendar. Ask me how I know!
--G.
* Note that US public schools are what I think you call "comprehensive" schools over there: government-funded and non-exclusive. More or less the complete opposite of what a public school is in the UK.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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