Staff Writer Polly Symes critiques King’s College London’s two semester system, questioning its impact on teaching quality, rent costs, and student experience, while calling for greater scrutiny of its academic calendar.
Within two weeks, semester two of my first year at university will be finished. And with that, all my teaching time. Clocking in at a grand total of twenty weeks, that equates to less than half of a full year (fifty-two weeks).
As a first year student, it has surprised me that the student body, and the academic staff, do not discuss our university’s strange term dates, and their impacts, more often. The two-semester system is something that has ramifications across the board, whether that’s on student experience, academic standards, rent costs and summer plans. And yet, there is a culture of silence on just how abnormal it is.
Let’s dig in to what the two-semester system is, how it works, and what the alternatives are.
All UK universities have to divide up their academic year. Most do this by dividing the year into three terms, with the first term being from September-December, the second from January-March, and the third from April-June.
King’s, on the other hand, has two semesters. Not three terms. However, instead of those two semesters covering the equivalent number of weeks, the second semester at King’s finishes on Friday 28th March. To put that clearly: King’s students are missing out on an entire three months compared to what students at other universities (such as Cambridge) receive.
Let’s delve into the consequences of this.
Why Do We Get So Few Contact Hours?
Firstly: teaching time. Before we even discuss the semester-system, it is a well-known fact that many King’s courses offer a very low number of contact hours – which is the time spent in lectures, seminars, and tutorials.
For example, I am a first year CMCI undergraduate, and I have 8 hours of contact time a week. Meanwhile, my cousin (who studied English Literature at Exeter University), had twenty hours a week. That’s over double the amount of time. The low number of hours has meant, from my experience, that my lecturers rarely reach the end of their lecture slides in the allotted hour.
Combine this with the two-semester system, and the problem grows exponentially. Having only two ten-week semesters mean that complex module content is crammed into too far little time, as we skip from topic to topic, week on week, only skimming the surface of broad issues; there simply isn’t enough time to look at them in more depth.
The Unexplored Cost of Rent Contracts
The second issue is rent costs. Most King’s Accommodation residences will have you paying rent up until mid-June, despite the fact that lectures finish in March, and many students are finished with their assignments and exams by May.
My final assignment is due on the 8 May, which leaves over a month where I am paying rent to King’s, without getting any teaching in return. For international students, the problem is felt even more dramatically. Whilst I, as a home student, am happy to remain in London knowing family lives close by, a lot of my international friends are going to fly home directly after the assessment period. This leaves them with weeks, if not months, of wasted rent, where they are paying to live in a hugely expensive city, without being offered anything in return from the university.
In Roar’s most recent print edition, Comment Editor Ruth Otim wrote a brilliant article on ‘careerism’, and its implications for students, defining the phenomenon as ‘the inclination to prioritize career development and orient your attitudes and activities towards said goal’.
With our second semester at King’s finishing in March, many students begin thinking about internships and summer jobs as early as January. My flatmate is on her fifth interview for one internship, having started the application process months ago. Whether or not internships are beneficial or a glorified form of exploitation is a question for another article, but what we can see is that the second semester at King’s is marked by the need to fill our endlessly long ‘summers.’
As a result, it could be argued that, in the second semester, students aren’t able to live in the now and fully enjoy student life, when looming over them is an up-to six-month gap that has to be filled with career-enriching, CV-complimenting activities.
My conclusion? The two-semester system is a rip-off. My twelve-week summer job is longer than half of the KCL academic year.
King’s – it is time to take note.
Second-year undergraduate at King’s College London reading Culture, Media and Creative Industries.
