This is my first post, and I’m using an old thread, because I think this info could help people and I didn’t know where else to put it.
People talk a lot about the 7-week terms and how that makes things really fast-paced, but here is what we didn’t understand about 7-week terms, even though a cousin and a best friend were already at WPI:
- The problem of timely grading
Timely grading is a problem anywhere, but a 7-week term hugely exacerbates the consequences of delayed returns.
Calculus solution: No solution - they handed graded stuff back long after it mattered, if at all. By the end of the 7-week terms (both A and B), my son had only half of his calculus work returned; he had no relevant work returned before heading into any of the tests. Not getting timely graded feedback also means you can’t adjust how you are approaching the class if you aren’t doing well, because you don’t know you’re not doing well until it is too late to do anything about it. (There was a similar problem in a social sciences class - by the end of the term, he did not have a single graded assignment returned, so he had never had the opportunity to make adjustments in how he responded to the assignments to better match teacher expectations.)
Physics solution: Autograding - everything is on computer, answers are entered into text boxes (NOT multiple choice). You find out immediately (problem by problem) if you got the right answer or the wrong one, BUT there is no way to tell (1) if you had the right answer but you just didn’t match the expected form, or (2) if you had exactly the right idea but made a small mistake somewhere, or (3) if you have a major misconception. So it is infuriating and useless for learning. Also, no partial credit in the traditional sense; it doesn’t matter if you lost track of a factor of 2 along the way or you had the problem completely wrong from start to finish - it’s the same outcome. Partial credit does exist in the sense that you can do multiple submissions for decreasing credit for a right answer, but my son often found he used that only when he realized his answer was probably marked wrong because of formatting.
- No opportunity to settle into a routine
It’s always hard starting a new term (high school or college) - you have no idea how difficult you will find the assignments, how you will need to pursue the material for the best outcome, what the best way is to get additional help, how to balance the different classes. It takes a few weeks to get it all sorted out. But with 7-week terms, just when you’ve got it all sorted out, the term is over and you are starting 3 new classes. It was actually this piece that made us realize that WPI would probably be a bad fit for our other son, who always has a rough month at the beginning of each school year, but then things settle out and the rest of the year is fine.
Hope this is helpful.