Editor’s note – The author draws from personal experience to discuss how the semester system can be either a boon or a bane depending on how it is executed.
Author’s note – I got my undergraduate degree from a reputed University in Kolkata. I have written this article since I feel I had had the worst experience in regard to the semester pattern followed in such a reputed university. It conducts an entrance exam of quite an appreciable standard and admits the crème, only to end up treating them so badly that they often resort to inviting guest lecturers of seriously inefficient capacity who come and read out notes from dirty yellow notebooks (that were probably written when they were students themselves) and get much annoyed when they are questioned by any of us. They do all of this to deal with the deadline of the semester! Also often when we had a paper on Greece and Rome we had been deprived of studying Rome entirely on grounds of time constraint. However when I had absolutely lost faith in the system and moved to a different university that is of international acclaim, I realized it was way more efficient. Both these institutions are government sponsored and have been dealing with the semester system for quite a good number of years. But the difference in their dealing made me realize that the fault lies not with the system but with its execution and in my article I have tried best in a concise manner to argue the same.