Narrator: Now listen to two students discussing the announcement.
Male student: I’m glad I’m graduating next year. I don’t think the trimester system is going to turn out well.
Female student: Well, we were the only school that was still using semesters.
Male student: Sure, for schools around here. But how about study abroad? When I studied abroad, the program was a whole semester, not just a trimester. Students won’t be able to go to that program anymore… unless they want to come back here halfway through a trimester.
Female student: Yeah, I guess the schedules wouldn’t line up. I didn’t think of that.
Male student: A lot of my professors have been complaining about it, too. Our classes are already designed to be 15 weeks long. What are they going to do, cut out a third of the class material so it fits into 10 weeks? It’s not that simple.
Female student: It’ll probably take awhile to redesign all of the classes.
Male student: Yeah, they’ll have to totally change a lot of courses… or else the professors will just try to teach the same material, in two-thirds as much time. It seems like way too much trouble to be worth it.
Narrator: The man expresses his opinion of the trimester system. State his opinion and explain the reasons he gives for holding that opinion.
The male student, uh, does not agree that the school should move from semester program to trimester program. He says that, uh, even though other local schools are using trimesters… so it might be easier on the same schedule… he, um, did a study abroad program that was also on a semester schedule. So, uh, if the program didn’t have the same schedule, it would have been much more difficult to do that, um, because the schedules would not line up and students would have to, uh, they would have to… not be on the same schedule… He also said that, uh, the current classes are 15 weeks, and if they move to 10 weeks, the professors are either going to have to cut, uh, a bunch of things, which will take some time. Or… or the other thing is that they might try to teach 15 weeks worth of learning into 10 weeks, which is not ideal either.
This topic is somewhat confusing, but the student does a good job of remembering and summarizing the details. In the middle of her response, she loses track of her sentence a little bit. But she pauses for a moment and is able to get herself back on track.