I've never heard of this "quarters" system. It doesn't involve flipping coins into beer glasses, does it?

I know in Canada, most schools operate on the semester system. The few that don't operate on a full-year system, but offer most of their courses as half credits. Classes are either 12 weeks (for a semester) or 24 (for a full year). It's usually the introductory classes that are 24 weeks long, with 2nd - 4th year classes being 12 weeks in length.

Anyone's allowed to register in a class in their given faculty, other than a thesis or project class (and maybe some labs), so long as they have the pre-requisite courses. Some universities may limit the courses you can take in other faculties, and some schools within the universities may not allow people not registered in that school to take courses (the school of fine arts, and the school of music at Queen's University were like this -- they either offered extremely limited enrolment, or only allowed enrolment during the summer months).

Is this similar to how it's usually done in the US? I guess it never really occurred to me that it would be different.

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