Length + Duration: 1,936 words, approximately 5-minute read.
Purpose
This blog article’s purpose is to equip you with a robust knowledge base for future success in various classes, despite their duration, subject, or setting.
Blog Article Objectives
You should:
Additional Assistance
Reach out to a teacher/professor or trusted adult should you have other questions and/or concerns! Consult external resources such as prepscholar.com for further insight. Remember that this should help guide you through your academic journey so you must determine what personally works best.
It’s about time...to check your syllabus! A syllabus provides the framework to sound infrastructure — a passing grade in this case. It contains valuable information similar to the sample above. This section covers class type with respect to duration. Is it a year-long-, semester-, trimester-, or quarter- based course? Is it an accelerated summer one? You can usually find this information near the top of your syllabus. It’s important because it determines how the instructor organizes course content, thus affecting how you learn. In short, it’s all about that pace!
Ah, the year-long course. Results as a blessing or a curse. Year-long courses remain commonplace at high school, yet you may discover an outlier or two in college/university, especially if it continues from one (e.g., some colleges and universities split precalculus into two separate “course” classes). Regardless, an entire school year allows instructors and students to more thoroughly explore topics (unless it’s an accelerated degree program or something similar). Instructors typically space out exams with ample time to study, or incorporate multiple exams covering less material. These classes also provide flexibility. Instructors can easily adjust the time dedicated to each topic, depending on students’ needs. Plus, you’re free to either work ahead (at least complete assignments early), or invest additional time to learn the material, should you struggle. Beware, year-long courses are especially prone to stagnant periods, which murder momentum and potentially your grade. Remain vigilant because instructors often throw in curveballs. They **too have additional time that’s otherwise lost in semester or trimester courses, so they may expect more from you — arising through difficult, more specific exam questions. Tricky, right? Effectively, they can go beyond testing the waters to testing the students instead. Tread carefully.
Semester courses typically dominate college. However, you can find them in high school, too. A few AP classes such as Microeconomics and Macroeconomics run for a single semester (or fifteen to sixteen weeks), in addition to some school-specific electives. This is either because a course only contains a semester’s worth of information [at a year-long’s pace], or has a time limit/imminent deadline. It’s usually the latter, particularly in college. Less time translates to content-heavy, albeit fewer, exams. Consequently, you’re responsible for more work. But what if it’s the former and you simply take a shorter class with less material? Instructors can optimally pace students for learning, oftentimes covering a topic in further depth (similar to a year-long pace). The only downside is if your current course is a future one’s prerequisite — you may need to review plenty more than if you’d taken them consecutively. This also holds true for AP classes, since College Board only administers exams in May (June as well for this year) — unfortunate for those first-semester AP students. That said, it is a shorter course, so the sooner you begin, the sooner you finish. It can also be nice to take something different semester-to-semester, whether in high school or college. A two-in-one special.