<p>My school’s on a quarter system, including mandatory classes during the summer some years. Each quarter is 10 weeks, finals are the 11th week, midterms are usually week 5 or 6. I’ve only had one or two classes with 2 midterms and the first one does sneak up on you really quickly. You never have to do work over the breaks, but your breaks usually won’t coincide with semester system schools’ breaks.</p>
<p>The way it’s set up, if you go to school 3 quarters a year it is actually roughly the same amount of time as going for 2 15-week semesters, it just seems like more because it’s divided into smaller sections of time. You also get to take more classes, which to me is a plus but I guess some other people might not see it that way. I need 185 credits for graduation, where at most other schools I would need about 120. </p>
<p>The biggest downside, IMO, is that it’s hard to transfer to a semester system school because the classes don’t match up. For instance, you might be required to take Calculus I, II, and III for your major, which would be 1 year’s worth of Calc classes, each 10 weeks and 3 credits. At another school that same sequence would be Calc I and II, each also 3 credits, but 15 weeks long. So if you transferred, you couldn’t directly substitute them for each other because you learn a different amount of stuff in each class. You would basically have to be doing a sequence of 3 classes at a quarter school to equal a sequence of 2 classes at a semester school…which only works if you have sequenced classes. I know a couple people who looked into transferring and one who actually did, and this is the problem they ran into.</p>