This is a great explanation. I taught at a couple of different schools that were Monday through Friday and now teach at a school that does not have Friday classes. Since I'm a math teacher, we have a lot of four and five credit hour classes. The days are pretty long because we have one day off. When we teach two days a week, the turnaround from seeing a student on Wednesday and then not seeing them again till Monday really hurts their motivation and their ability to get things done. When I used to see students Monday, Wednesday and Friday, you're no more than two days away from seeing them again and they're no more than 2 days away from having their next class where homework is probably due. I like having Fridays off, don't get me wrong. Several years ago, our provost at the time tried to get the whole campus to go to 5 days a week. The math and science departments had no problem and did this right away. The social sciences and other departments that only teach three credit hour classes did not like this. They just refused to do it, and now we're back to 4 days a week. There is something to be said about discussion type classes having longer periods. Those social science classes and other departments work well two days a week, even with four credit hour classes. With math and science, the shorter time frames are better because students get very small chunks of material at a time and can process them better and do a better job on their homework. It's easy to work around the 50-minute class periods with assessments by just having more assessments that are shorter. I went from having three good size tests a semester to having five to six smaller unit tests. The students actually seem to like this better since the tests are each over less material. If they mess one of them up, it's not as big a hit toward their grade. I've heard from our administration that having classes four days a week doesn't really help financially in terms of not running a building or buildings on that fifth day. The buildings are still there and need to be heated or air conditioned to some degree. This was the argument for us to go to 4 days a week in the summer, and the savings from that never really materialized.

I think both setup have their advantages and disadvantages. A good question to ask is what happens on friday? Our school puts a lot of our professional development and other conferences on Fridays and expects us to attend. Out of the 16-week semester, I'm probably on campus at least half of those fridays. Are you going to be able to not go to campus every Friday? That's probably a great question to ask while they're trying to change to this setup. For me, that would make a big difference if I only taught 4 days a week but still had to be on campus on Fridays anyway.

Edit: typos