The End of the Semester aka Procrastination Entry

It's very hard to believe that I am less than 2 weeks away from the end of my 1st semester here! Between now and then, I have to get through 3 tests, 2 presentations, and 1 mini paper. However, the 3 tests are really the only finals work - the presentations are something standard that I could have chosen to do earlier, but not thinking about finals, chose to do now. Oh well. Somehow, I'm also not that stressed, which is good, because I probably will be very soon.

There is some confusion with tests because I'm not in the regular German system. For example, for my literature seminar, the final administered covers the seminar and then the 2 introductory courses which the other students had to take. Luckily I will just be taking the part covering the seminar. Everything does seem a bit more confusing here though, especially because they're changing over all the degree requirements to a Bachelor system, replacing the traditional system, and the mix of students mean that in each class, some students might not need to take exams while others will, or some may need to write final papers while others don't.

I know that in America some schools are much stricter about course requirements than Oberlin, but in Germany it works a little differently. First of all, you enter the uni through a field, so you begin taking classes in your department right away. However, at least in the German major, you have many requirements for your degree. Basically everyone in I've talked to in the 2nd year has to take the equivalent of probably 2 100 levels and 1 200 level course this semester. There is much more stress on having an overview - the 100 levels are large survey lectures which go through all the German literature eras. In my seminar, the other students were complaining about how there is a lot of rigidity, and to me there's also a lack of communication about requirements. They mentioned that there never seems to be much real engagement with what they want to learn at first since they're just in big lectures. However, my professor mentioned that when she was an undergrad, they could take whatever they wanted and didn't get the breadth which could better contextualize the literature.
I can see the validity in both sides of the arguments and think it's an interesting question also quite applicable to US universities.