While studying online during the winter 2021 semester I had already realized the massive amount of differences between the Indian and Canadian education systems.
In the Canadian education system, we can choose our own courses for the semester, and the class list is always different for each course in each semester. Initially, it was pretty complicated for me as an international student who is completely new to this system. I wasn’t even sure how to register for the courses. For international students new to this education system, it might not be easy to figure this out, which is why international academic advisors register for courses on behalf of international students for their first semester.
Since I was already registered for the courses, I just had to attend classes and take exams. I had different classmates for every course. As much as I think that this system is complicated, it’s also quite advantageous. We get to have the freedom to choose the number of courses, the professor for the course, whether it will be online or in person, when the course is, and the course itself.
Basically, we get the option to choose for ourselves whatever we feel would be right for us.
The education system in other parts of the world is completely different from this. For example, in India, we choose a stream after tenth grade which decides our entire future. Those streams are divided into three—mainly science, commerce, and arts—and many students just opt for a stream without much thought or consideration. So a person who wants to be a marketer should choose the commerce stream, which has all the basic commerce courses.
After high school, a student enrols into an undergraduate school, where, for the first time, they get to have the semester system. For example, I had chosen to graduate with a bachelor of business administration in International Business. I had the same classmates from my first year until my last year. The only thing that changed during my degree was my classroom, which was upgraded to another floor as I finished with the previous year.
For every six-month semester we had a set of six compulsory courses. We submitted assignments every three weeks and had a final exam at the end of the semester. Our classmates never changed.
We could just study the night before our exams, mug up and pass the courses, but we actually won’t be able to learn anything if we did that. So most of us tried to read and understand the concepts way before our final exams.
Here the system is more elaborate—we take tests almost every other week and submit assignments with proper citations every other week. It helps us to learn the course concepts thoroughly. The final exams don’t even hold much weight, which allows the student to be able to learn and do better from the beginning.