From
this year, SFC has started dividing the school year into two semesters from three
terms. The number of times and the seasons when exams are held have changed,
with some other adjustments in the school calendar, but I do not find my school
life improving, and personally prefer the older system with three terms.
With
the two semester system, the final exams are held right after the summer
vacation. This might seem convenient because there is longer time to prepare
for the exams. However, we tend to be more occupied with clubs during summer,
and of course, enormous amount of assignments prevents us from doing test
preparation. The exams are held in approximately two weeks after the school resumption,
so there is not much time left after the summer vacation to study. As a result,
we cannot spend our precious holiday spending time with our friends and families
as much as we were able to until last year. This is my first reason why I do
not approve of the new school system.
The
second reason why I prefer the old system is that there is less time to work on
the Bunkasai project. This year, many classes had to be in a hurry in order to
complete their class projects because there was not enough time to work on them.
Bunkasai preparation weeks started on the first day of the second semester. Furthermore,
because of the final exams at the end of September, we cannot spend time discussing
on Bunkasai before the preparation week. With only one month to prepare, the
contents of a project would necessarily be limited, or else its quality would
be low. Because a Bunkasai is a big annual event, I want to spend a fair amount
of time working on it.
The
last reason why I believe the two-semester system is inefficient because of the
exams becoming less frequent, resulting in the exam coverage getting broader. Mid-term
exam and end-of-term exam is each held twice, with four exams in one school
year. Some subjects, which have only one session a week, only have two exams in
one school year, without the mid-terms. Until last year, there were five exams
in a year and some subjects even had a test right after the summer vacation,
adding up to six exams a year in total, with at least three in each subjects.
This may sound like a tough schedule, but the exams had less coverage, making
it easy for us to study. Simply calculating, six exams turned into four exams
means that the exam coverage got 1.5 times broader.
To
sum up, the two semester system is not bringing much advantage to our school
lives. We have a hard time studying for final exams during summer vacations
which are meant to somewhat take away our mind from school works, less time of
Bunkasai preparation, and more exam coverage to study in each exams. I wish the
school would resume to the old three terms system.
