Report of the Department of Policy Studies

To:     Duncan Lindsey, Chair, UCLA Academic Senate

From:   Mark A. Peterson, Chair, Department of Policy Studies
        School of Public Policy and Social Research

Re:     Semester versus Quarter System

Date:   March 14, 2003


        At its March faculty meeting this week, the faculty of the Department of Policy Studies discussed the question of whether or not a switch by UCLA to a semester system would enhance the educational mission of our program, as well as serve the combined objectives of teaching, research, and service pursued by all units on campus.  Ten of our thirteen FTE faculty were available and participated in the meeting; an eleventh faculty member submitted to me before hand his views and vote. 

        Focusing on our particular program  educating for the professional degree, Master of Public Policy  the consensus position of the Policy Studies faculty is that a semester system would be detrimental and reduce the quality of the educational experience for our students.  A professional program like ours must have an extensive required core curriculum embodying a vast range of essential knowledge and skills across multiple domains.  Our core curriculum, for example, covers myriad concepts, skills, and techniques from microeconomic analysis, empirical methods, empirical and normative methods of policy analysis, politics, institutions, and management, as well as a capstone experience, which we call the “applied policy project.”  Our core currently has eleven courses.  We are currently in the midst of a comprehensive curriculum review, which is revealing important gaps in our existing core.  Both our experience to date with the core curriculum as presently constituted and our deeply substantive discussions of possible improvements in the core make it patently clear to us that what we teach, and how we need to teach, cannot be accomplished in a semester system.  There are too many intellectual and analytical dimensions to be covered appropriately in fewer courses organized in fifteen-week segments, and the way these dimensions “clump” works much better in a ten-week than a fifteen-week format.  Indeed, there was general agreement among our faculty that a semester system would require us to introduce modules for the core curriculum, effectively circumventing the semester arrangement.  Some of us have previous teaching experience in public policy programs that use the semester calendar.  They have involved five- to ten-week modules, which are much more difficult to organize, staff, grade, allocate loads among faculty, and create a sense of coherence for the students. 

        A second feature of our MPP curriculum is a set of policy-area concentrations.  Each MPP student must choose at least one concentration.  A semester system, with its more limited number of courses, would aggravate the already enormous challenge of mounting a sufficient number of courses to give substantive meaning to the concentrations. 

        Thus, even excluding other issues  research time for a world-class faculty, service at all levels of the university and beyond the camps, and the practical costs of a transition in the academic calendar  it is our view that a semester system would reduce in absolute terms the quality of our education program and would greatly complicate rather than enhance pedagogy in the professional school context.. 

        Of course, shifting to a semester system would not occur in a vacuum.  There would be enormous implications for faculty time, staff resources, and budgets.  Our faculty already feel overburdened by the administrative loads created by the UC personnel system and other duties not common to our competing institutions.  Revamping our entire core curriculum (including those components that are already working well), having to develop and implement a system of modules, reorganizing all other courses, among other associated tasks, would consume a substantial amount of faculty time, which would have to be drawn from research, current teaching (preparation for classroom instruction), as well as existing service commitments.  With regard to staff time and the monetary costs of such a transition (altering every relevant document, web page, etc.), we can imagine no worse time to contemplate such a change.  The university as a whole is suffering far from trivial reductions in program support and staff reductions are widespread and likely to intensify this year. 

The Policy Studies faculty as a whole concluded that even with the report from the Joint Committee, any comparable benefits of the semester system for the campus as a whole remain highly ambiguous and far from sufficient to make claims of superiority.  Judging the value of a transition of this magnitude requires far more effective substantive analysis.  The member of the Policy Studies faculty who could not attend our meeting stated the issues cogently in his message to me:

UCLA has been providing its students with an outstanding education using the quarter system for nearly 40 years.  No one can say for sure whether it would be even better under the semester system [for all UCLA programs taken together], but even if it were, the additional benefits would likely be small.  However, we can say for sure that the transition would be extremely costly.  Thus we are being asked to agree to a policy change that would impose certain and high costs today in hopes of uncertain but at best small benefits in the future.  I know how we would tell our students to evaluate a prospect of this type.

        Taking all of these issues into consideration, the faculty of the Policy Studies Department voted unanimously to endorse the quarter system and oppose shifting to a semester system. 

        Some members of our faculty suggested that the quarter system itself could be improved.  We have all noticed, for example, that under the current arrangements the UCLA quarter system does not have “reading” periods prior to final exams.  Modest adjustments could be made in the calendar to permit at least three-day reading periods for each quarter, which would help students prepare for exams and draft lengthy and substantive papers. 

        I hope that you and your colleagues in the Academic Senate find this report helpful.