Opinion Piece

           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.