“RIT’s change to semesters has been a complete shit show,” said President Wrestler. Since the beginning of the first semester in August 2013, nearly 40 percent of RIT students have failed out. The Semester Solution Task Force was put into action in early December 2013 in order to propose a solution to The Semester Problem.
Due to the overwhelming number of struggling students, RIT Provost Sir Jim Cricket has decided to officially wipe the 2013-2014 academic year from existence. All traces of the semester system will be destroyed and all current plans will be abandoned. Students will retake all of the material that was covered in semesters on a brand new octester system.
Senior Vice President of RIT Financial Issues Dr. Barry Plump explained that RIT students will be refunded their tuition for the year. “We had an alarming volume of phone calls coming from Long Island mothers,” he said. “They were concerned about how RIT was planning to correct the wrong done to their precious children and rightly so. The financial team has approved the refunding of tuition as well as coverage for any health issues students have suffered due to our mistake.”
This new octester system was created by the Semester Solution Task Force and has been approved by President Wrestler, Provost Cricket and Institute Council. The system will have eight terms of two different types with one week of break separating each individual term. The model is as follows.
Six consecutive terms will begin the last full week of August. These terms will consist of five and a half weeks of classes and one half week of exams. A 20 credit minimum will be set for full-time students.
There will be two terms during the summer months, following the regular academic terms. These terms will follow the format of three and a half weeks of classes and one half week of exams. The summer terms will be mostly supplemental and students will not allowed to take more than five credits per term.
The institute will not be closed for any days other than the weeks between terms. The octester system does not allow for instances such as holidays or snow days. Students who miss class for health, religious or any other purposes will be asked to pay their remaining tuition fees and leave RIT for good.
Dick Toonasamic, Student Government vice president, publicly voiced his support of the system along the Quarter Mile. “Octesters are going to be great,” he said. “We won’t need to worry about remembering more than, like, five weeks of material at a time, we won’t need to celebrate religious holidays and we’ll have a full 10 weeks of summer vacation. I can’t believe we didn’t come up with this sooner.”
The task force plans to survey students from Illinois, Indiana, Idaho and Iowa in April 2014 to determine how the student population at RIT feels about the change to octesters. No matter the results, the change is scheduled to be implemented for the 2014-2015 academic year.
