UCD semesterisation still stalled

UCD's ACADEMIC council meets today to consider the latest progress report from the college committee formed to consider semesterisation proposals amid speculation that further progress on the issue is likely to be suspended for the present.

UCD was originally supposed to be fully semesterised by the start of the 1995 96 academic year but widespread opposition among students and staff led to its postponement for a year. It now seems unlikely that further progress on the issue will be made until 1998.

"There is a meeting of the academic council on Tuesday and one of the items on the agenda is a review of a progress report from the committee considering semesterisation," Dr Tony Scott, of UCD's public affairs office, said. No formal decision will be made until the committee meets, he said however, he said, UCD will continue in effect to operate a semesterised calendar the next academic year in September.

But at a meeting of the cumbersomely titled Committee to Decide What Model of Semesterisation Might Suit UCD on January 18th, it was proposed that semesterisation should effectively be shelved until facilities in the college had improved sufficiently to enable it to proceed effectively.

Those faculties already semesterised will continue to operate under that system it seems unlikely that any further faculties will semesterise until 1998 at the earliest.

The problems involved in holding mid year semester exams in the college were amply demonstrated during January exams held earlier this year in faculties already semesterised. While students commenced mid year examinations on January 8th, the college library had only been open for one day between December 22nd and the commencement of exams, leaving over 1,000 students with what the students" union claimed was completely inadequate access to library facilities.

While Garrett Tubridy, UCD students' union education officer, was reluctant to preempt any announcement by the academic council, he said the union had been mandated to campaigned for the deferral of semesterisation. If that was achieved, he said, it would be up to future students' union officers to organise a referendum on the issue of final acceptance or rejection of the whole idea.

"Nothing has changed between now and this time last year vis-a-vis the allocation of resources to provide for the introduction of semesterisation," he said. "We argued that semesterisation was unfeasible and that there were far more pressing problems for the college to deal with, including overcrowding and the necessity to further increase expenditure on library facilities."

Last year TCD indefinitely shelved its modularisation and semesterisation proposals amid widespread unhappiness among lecturers and students. If, as expected, UCD suspends progress, it will leave only DCU on schedule to introduce semesterisation this year, joining UCG and UL, the only other," semesterised universities in the Republic.