Semester break
As semester break are (partly unofficially) the semester breaks between semesters designated (half academic years) of various educational institutions. A distinction must be made between the semester break between the semesters at universities and the school break, known in Austria as semester break, between the first and second half of the school year.
Semester break at the universities
The holidays at universities are officially referred to as the lecture-free period , as they are also used for exams and their preparation, for courses and for writing student papers. In Germany, the lecture-free periods between winter and summer semesters and between summer and winter semesters are referred to as semester breaks, in Austria only the former.
In Germany, most universities calculate the winter semester (WS) from October 1 to March 31, and the summer semester (SS) from April 1 to September 30; the semester break is at the end of this period. If you subtract the lecture-free period, the two semesters last 15 weeks (the SS sometimes only 14 weeks). The semesters of the universities of applied sciences (and also some universities) start a month earlier.
The winter holidays last between five and eight weeks regionally and are mainly in the months of February and March, sometimes until the beginning of April. Universities with shorter semester breaks have longer summer holidays. Deviating regulations may have a. the University of Mannheim (Christmas until mid-February) and universities with a trimester structure .
In Austria , the semester break at universities is usually only postponed from the beginning to the end of February, in the west it is also postponed by a week to March (to compensate, the summer holidays are longer than in the Federal Republic of Germany). The technical universities used to have a two-week semester break and were extended to four weeks in the 1980s, but at the same time shortened the Easter break.
Semester break at schools
The German-speaking countries only use the term semester break in Austria for the school break during the school half-year. In Germany and Switzerland, on the other hand, the terms winter holidays , carnival holidays or sports holidays are common.
Austria introduced the semester break in the 1970s. In connection with the 1973 oil crisis , a week of minimally heated school buildings during the coldest season was intended to help save heating energy. Since then, the term energy holidays has also been used. The holiday week marks exactly the middle of the school year and therefore falls in the first half of February . The dates differ regionally, however: Vienna and Lower Austria begin in the first week of February, the other federal states (Burgenland, Carinthia, Salzburg, Tyrol, Vorarlberg) follow a week later. Upper Austria and Styria follow a week later, where the “energy holidays” fall on the third week of February.
Web links
- Semester break , Studenten-WG.de
- How do students spend their semester break? Uni-Blog.info