I just realised that there's probably an entire generation of first year undergraduates out there who think that they're the class of 2010, not the class of 2007.
Heh; there's a parochialism that I didn't realize I had, with the three-year rather than four-year degree bit.
In the U.S., your question makes no sense; virtually everyone does a four-year degree program, and is assumed to be doing so until/unless they decide otherwise.
The fact that this system makes things confusing for people who take (say) five years to complete a nominally four-year program is an accuracy, not an inaccuracy -- generally, a person who does that will be taking the early classes with one set of classmates, and the later classes with a different set of classmates, so that an undergraduate who started this year and takes five years to graduate will have classmates in both the "Class of 2011" and the "Class of 2012". Whatever officialdom counted their class-year would probably consider them the "Class of 2011" until they informed it that they expected to graduate in 2012 instead, at which point it would consider them "Class of 2012". Depending on where most of their friends were, they might attend either one of the reunions, though the official invite would be to the "Class of 2012" one.
(I am not at all sure how this works for programs that are intentionally five-year programs, at the end of which one gets an undergraduate and a master's degree simultaneously. Those are constructed largely as a normal four-year program plus an extra year, and thus one would have close classmates who graduated the year previously from the four-year version of the program....)
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drplokta
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-26 08:12 pm (UTC)In the U.S., your question makes no sense; virtually everyone does a four-year degree program, and is assumed to be doing so until/unless they decide otherwise.
The fact that this system makes things confusing for people who take (say) five years to complete a nominally four-year program is an accuracy, not an inaccuracy -- generally, a person who does that will be taking the early classes with one set of classmates, and the later classes with a different set of classmates, so that an undergraduate who started this year and takes five years to graduate will have classmates in both the "Class of 2011" and the "Class of 2012". Whatever officialdom counted their class-year would probably consider them the "Class of 2011" until they informed it that they expected to graduate in 2012 instead, at which point it would consider them "Class of 2012". Depending on where most of their friends were, they might attend either one of the reunions, though the official invite would be to the "Class of 2012" one.
(I am not at all sure how this works for programs that are intentionally five-year programs, at the end of which one gets an undergraduate and a master's degree simultaneously. Those are constructed largely as a normal four-year program plus an extra year, and thus one would have close classmates who graduated the year previously from the four-year version of the program....)