Student Life

Assalamu'alaikum readers.

I'm currently on my second week of short semester 2011/2012 of my undergraduate study in IIUM Gombak. A short semester is the third semester of the year. The duration of the short semester is only 7 weeks (half the duration of the usual semester). The purpose of the short semester differs from kulliyyah or majorings.

Some kulliyyahs only offers short semester to students that are in need to catch-up with credits left-behind from previous semesters. In other words, not all students are able to take short semester in this kulliyyah and the only students who are taking the short semester are students who most probably have failed one or more courses in the past and wanting to catch-up with his/her other friends academically.

Some kulliyyahs or majorings (BAcc for example) requires their students to take short semester because it is part of their study curriculum. Failing to do so will require the students to extend their study for more than 4 years. This is because, some majors requires a lot of courses and credits to be done and acquired by the students and the kulliyyah have already prepared a study plan showing in detail what courses to take on which semesters. This also somehow reflects the general difficulty of the majoring.

Some other majorings like mine (BScIF) gives their students the free-will to take short semester or not. It depends on the personal study style of the student. For instance, if the students wants to graduate earlier than the default duration (4 years usually), he might want to take more courses during short semesters.

source: google

A student might also not want to graduate earlier but he wants to take short semester because he doesn't want to burden his long semester much. For example, during that year he has to finish 36 credit hours and a year has 2 long semesters and 1 short semester. He might divide his credits to 15 credits on first long sem, 15 credits on second long sem and 6 credits during short sem (15/15/6). He can also distribute his credits like this 18/18/0. In this case, he doesn't have to take short sem but in consequence, his long sem will be burdened with more courseworks, assignments, etc. He might want to do this because those who are not taking short semester will have a holiday for 3 months to wait for the upcoming long semester. He might want to take a job somewhere to earn earnings or to just have a rest at home.


Not all courses are available during short semester. You might be wondering how can the same courses during long semesters be applied to short semesters because a course in long semester takes 14 weeks for the students to go through. Well, it's easy. Just extend the number of classes per week or the number of hours per classes or both. The syllabus should be taught fully by the end of the semester one way or another.

I'm currently doing 2 courses in short sem. First course, ICT has 3 classes per week with 2 hours per class. This is something that is preferable by most because 2 hours per class is still sustainable. But for my second course, Business Ethics has 2 classes per week with 3 hours per class! I'm still struggling with this course because I can't help myself from sleeping during continuous 3-hour lecture. Moreover, if the course is not that interesting. Just look at the title of my course! (Allah help me, ameen)

source: google

Despite my whining, there are actually a lot of time to spare for students doing short semester. It depends on the students on what to do with their free-time. (I feel like writing a new blog post just to talk about this, so stay tuned!)

Thanks for reading readers, salam.


Abbreviations:
IIUM - International Islamic University Malaysia
BAcc - Bachelor of Accounting
BScIF - Bachelor of Science in Islamic Finance
ICT - Informarion and Communication Technology