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AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904

The GW Hatchet

Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

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Officials name senior vice president, chief of staff
By Fiona Riley, Assistant News Editor • March 26, 2024

Letters to the editor

Not simply downsizing
On behalf of the Alternative Academic Calendar Committee, I hope that students and others will suspend judgment on the four-by-four option until they have had a chance to study our findings. Nonetheless, The Hatchet editorial (“Squeezing academics,” April 24, p. 4) makes one point that should be challenged immediately.

It stated that if a four-credit course met for the same number of hours per week as a three-credit course, students would “receive less instruction time for the same price,” because they would be taking fewer courses to graduate.

This does not follow. If you assume that instruction time equals seat time spent listening to lectures, then you can say there is “less instruction time” in four-by-four. But there are other kinds of instruction time to consider, and some of them go up in a four-by-four environment.

Everything else being equal, four-by-four would mean that, on average, each instructor would teach about 20 percent fewer students overall in a given term – through some combination of faculty course load reduction and smaller classes (we are not considering options that reduce the size of the faculty). This reduction in a professor’s average “student case load” per term would enable the professor to comment in more detail on papers and examinations, hold more individual conferences with each student and collaborate with a bigger fraction of students on research projects. These forms of instruction are widely seen as likely to increase student engagement in the learning process.

Regarding the reasons for considering four-by-four, anyone contemplating a large institutional change must take into account the financial costs and benefits, but be assured that the committee’s deliberations have focused on nothing more heavily than nurturing an academic environment that both engages and challenges students and faculty.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the educational benefits of the move to four-by-four outweigh the educational negatives. But it is simplistic to regard four-by-four as educational downsizing.
-Charles Karelis chair, Alternative Academic Calendar Committee

Summer school sucks
I do not think we, as students, should have a mandatory summer session as rising juniors. I do not know about others, but who wants to go to school in the summer instead of going on vacation? I can see taking a class or two in the summer, but not a whole course load. If you want to do the trimester system, then do it the right way, with the third semester being optional. The four-by-four system is not right, either, because then you can only take four classes. I think taking five classes is better because it is easier to get all your classes toward your major done and be able to graduate in four years if you want. I think the possibility of the four-by-four system is going to make students stay here more than four years so they can get all the classes in for their major(s) or minor(s). Staying here longer means having to pay more money and students pay enough to go here, as it is.
-Ashley Whitmill, freshman

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