How on earth could a college student enrolled full-time only have 1.2 hours of in-class instruction per day? Back in my day, when we had a foot of snow on the ground and had to walk barefoot uphill in every direction, a 15-credit-hour semester amounted to 3 hour-long courses on MWF and 2 hour and a half courses Tu and Th. Even subtracting 10 minutes for time between classes, it comes to 2.83 hours per day, using a real-world example- my own freshman year. Am I splitting hairs, or does this seem wrong to anyone else?
A 15 credit semester for me, having been through undergrad within the decade, typically meant 1-2 courses with 1.5 hour lectures 3 days a week, a 3 hour lab or lecture once a week, and another 1-2 courses with a 1.5 or so hours of lecture twice a week. So yeah, 1.2 seems like a wild underestimate.
Unless maybe non-STEM programs are less rigorous? Since I was in the engineering department, a large chunk of my general education requirements were waived as there were simply too many requirements to cover (so, eg, no second language class and most others needing only one class in each category, setup so single classes could fulfill multiple categories).
Eg if you're an art student, maybe large amounts of classroom instruction isn't as important as large amounts of time to work on projects and then get feedback during class time?
The one art class I took (and instantly dropped) seemed to be like that. The hour long lectures were just about analyzing and discussing a piece each week, and instead there was a lot of work to be done on writing about the work and going to museums to perform studies (which is why I dropped it, as much as I enjoy museums, I prefer to enjoy them without worrying about grades).
I was in architecture. My roommate was a bio-chem major. Besides a full day of classes, I spent several hours a day in studio doing projects and my roommate spent several hours toiling away in the school lab.
All told, I lived in a house with several soccer teammates and we were all logging tons of time outside our normal classes in labs, studios, and elsewhere that were considered part of our normal class time which effectively extended the time professors expected you to be working on their stuff. Our weeks were just crammed hour to hour with homework, practices and games and trying to fit in 25-30 hours of part-time work a week to boot.
College was a blast, but it's not for the feint of heart or slacker.
Yeah, had a similar experience with my undergrad in CS.
The expectaton at the college I went to was that each credit hour roughly maps to 1 hour of lecture + 3 hrs of work outside of class. That estimate wasn’t even for getting an A, that was just to pass a class with a C. Which sounds like a lot, and it was, but you gotta account that this would include weekends as well (thus leaving some amount of free time, because otherwise it would require pulling 16 hour weekdays).
It definitely builds character, and I absolutely would do it the exact same way if I had to go back in time. However, I wouldn’t recommend my school to anyone who wants to do premed, because your GPA will needlessly suffer, and GPA is one of the primary importance metrics for med school acceptance.
When I did a CS degree in the 1980s at a UK university I think we had at least 4 hours of lectures per day - with lab hours and tutorials on top of that (maybe a couple of hours a day).
We thought we had it easy - the Electrical Engineering students we shared a lot of classes with had 8 hours a day in their timetables.
Edit: By fourth year I was practically living in the department building - easily averaging ~10 hours there then going to the pub or for a run...
My first year was 36 "hours" (an hour was 50 minutes, followed by a break of at least 10 minutes) per week, which included lab/terminal time. Homework was, as the word says, not included, but some classes mixed classical teaching, explanation, and exercises. The number of hours in class steadily dropped over the next years, as the homework load increased to 40+ hours for writing what's nowadays called the MSc. thesis.
I'm currently studying Electrical Engineering at a Russell Group UK uni. My timetable is nothing like what you are describing, so I think things have changed.
I have about 3-4 hours of lecture time per week and 3-4 hours of tutorial time with professors. That amounts to 8 hours per week.
A lot of it seems to have shifted to "self-directed learning" time, i.e. studying, doing labs, etc independently.
You're not going to like this: that degree cost me nothing financially - I didn't pay any fees and I got a full grant which was more than enough to live on and have a nice flat in central Edinburgh.
Edit: Turns out this was a pretty good investment by the taxpayers of the UK...
No - I went to the far less prestigious Heriot-Watt (although I was accepted by Edinburgh!) which at the time I was there had the distinct advantage of having the relevant departments located in the Grassmarket.
Fees for Scottish universities still free for students from Scotland though? I'm just bitter because my own son decided to go to an English Russel Group University...
I don’t understand this, we had 5h of classes a day in CS for 4 years in Spain, it’s still like that, and it was not particularly strenuous. There was plenty of time left to start my first company and a reasonable amount of leisure time, while maintaining top grades.
I have been in a number of other prestigious universities across EU after that, the actual instruction quality and difficulty was not any lesser in Spain.
How do they even learn anything with 1.2h?
EDIT: sure including the weekend that’s 3.6h per day, still is 3x.
It's obviously wrong, and by a lot. At every university I know of, a full-time courseload is defined as at least 12 hours in class per week, or 2.4 hours per weekday. The average student doesn't cut half their classes.
Perhaps by counting non-class days such as weekends, vacation and exam days? A semester at my school was 62 instruction days, so 3 * (62 / (365/3)) is about 1.5.
It's very wrong, when I was in college full time was 4-8 hours of class every day M-Th.
Beyond that assignments outside of classroom instruction were usually around 2 hours of work per hour of instruction, and MUCH more for non-entry level CS and SE classes.
Spending less than 3 hours a day for a full time student is legitimately insane.
In the US there seem to be a lot of requirements forced upon universities that limit how much instruction is allowed to be exclusively remote or online for a student to still be considered full time (by visa requirements for international students, and I think by student loan requirements for local students). IIRC only 3-4 credits of ~15 are allowed to be an online/hybrid course. Although courses which have in-person spaces, but allow remote viewing (no interaction) are fairly common.
Comments
How on earth could a college student enrolled full-time only have 1.2 hours of in-class instruction per day? Back in my day, when we had a foot of snow on the ground and had to walk barefoot uphill in every direction, a 15-credit-hour semester amounted to 3 hour-long courses on MWF and 2 hour and a half courses Tu and Th. Even subtracting 10 minutes for time between classes, it comes to 2.83 hours per day, using a real-world example- my own freshman year. Am I splitting hairs, or does this seem wrong to anyone else?
A 15 credit semester for me, having been through undergrad within the decade, typically meant 1-2 courses with 1.5 hour lectures 3 days a week, a 3 hour lab or lecture once a week, and another 1-2 courses with a 1.5 or so hours of lecture twice a week. So yeah, 1.2 seems like a wild underestimate.
Unless maybe non-STEM programs are less rigorous? Since I was in the engineering department, a large chunk of my general education requirements were waived as there were simply too many requirements to cover (so, eg, no second language class and most others needing only one class in each category, setup so single classes could fulfill multiple categories).
Eg if you're an art student, maybe large amounts of classroom instruction isn't as important as large amounts of time to work on projects and then get feedback during class time?
The one art class I took (and instantly dropped) seemed to be like that. The hour long lectures were just about analyzing and discussing a piece each week, and instead there was a lot of work to be done on writing about the work and going to museums to perform studies (which is why I dropped it, as much as I enjoy museums, I prefer to enjoy them without worrying about grades).
Its off by a massive margin.
I was in architecture. My roommate was a bio-chem major. Besides a full day of classes, I spent several hours a day in studio doing projects and my roommate spent several hours toiling away in the school lab.
All told, I lived in a house with several soccer teammates and we were all logging tons of time outside our normal classes in labs, studios, and elsewhere that were considered part of our normal class time which effectively extended the time professors expected you to be working on their stuff. Our weeks were just crammed hour to hour with homework, practices and games and trying to fit in 25-30 hours of part-time work a week to boot.
College was a blast, but it's not for the feint of heart or slacker.
Yeah, had a similar experience with my undergrad in CS.
The expectaton at the college I went to was that each credit hour roughly maps to 1 hour of lecture + 3 hrs of work outside of class. That estimate wasn’t even for getting an A, that was just to pass a class with a C. Which sounds like a lot, and it was, but you gotta account that this would include weekends as well (thus leaving some amount of free time, because otherwise it would require pulling 16 hour weekdays).
It definitely builds character, and I absolutely would do it the exact same way if I had to go back in time. However, I wouldn’t recommend my school to anyone who wants to do premed, because your GPA will needlessly suffer, and GPA is one of the primary importance metrics for med school acceptance.
When I did a CS degree in the 1980s at a UK university I think we had at least 4 hours of lectures per day - with lab hours and tutorials on top of that (maybe a couple of hours a day).
We thought we had it easy - the Electrical Engineering students we shared a lot of classes with had 8 hours a day in their timetables.
Edit: By fourth year I was practically living in the department building - easily averaging ~10 hours there then going to the pub or for a run...
My first year was 36 "hours" (an hour was 50 minutes, followed by a break of at least 10 minutes) per week, which included lab/terminal time. Homework was, as the word says, not included, but some classes mixed classical teaching, explanation, and exercises. The number of hours in class steadily dropped over the next years, as the homework load increased to 40+ hours for writing what's nowadays called the MSc. thesis.
I'm currently studying Electrical Engineering at a Russell Group UK uni. My timetable is nothing like what you are describing, so I think things have changed.
I have about 3-4 hours of lecture time per week and 3-4 hours of tutorial time with professors. That amounts to 8 hours per week.
A lot of it seems to have shifted to "self-directed learning" time, i.e. studying, doing labs, etc independently.
You're not going to like this: that degree cost me nothing financially - I didn't pay any fees and I got a full grant which was more than enough to live on and have a nice flat in central Edinburgh.
Edit: Turns out this was a pretty good investment by the taxpayers of the UK...
University of Edinburgh? That happens to be where I'm studying right now.
It's £28,950/year for EU students.
No - I went to the far less prestigious Heriot-Watt (although I was accepted by Edinburgh!) which at the time I was there had the distinct advantage of having the relevant departments located in the Grassmarket.
Fees for Scottish universities still free for students from Scotland though? I'm just bitter because my own son decided to go to an English Russel Group University...
I don’t understand this, we had 5h of classes a day in CS for 4 years in Spain, it’s still like that, and it was not particularly strenuous. There was plenty of time left to start my first company and a reasonable amount of leisure time, while maintaining top grades.
I have been in a number of other prestigious universities across EU after that, the actual instruction quality and difficulty was not any lesser in Spain.
How do they even learn anything with 1.2h?
EDIT: sure including the weekend that’s 3.6h per day, still is 3x.
I don't remember the exact numbers but undergrad would, I think, be at least 3 hours of classroom a day.
It's obviously wrong, and by a lot. At every university I know of, a full-time courseload is defined as at least 12 hours in class per week, or 2.4 hours per weekday. The average student doesn't cut half their classes.
Perhaps by counting non-class days such as weekends, vacation and exam days? A semester at my school was 62 instruction days, so 3 * (62 / (365/3)) is about 1.5.
It's very wrong, when I was in college full time was 4-8 hours of class every day M-Th.
Beyond that assignments outside of classroom instruction were usually around 2 hours of work per hour of instruction, and MUCH more for non-entry level CS and SE classes.
Spending less than 3 hours a day for a full time student is legitimately insane.
Maybe remote/online classes are getting to be a lot more popular post-COVID?
In the US there seem to be a lot of requirements forced upon universities that limit how much instruction is allowed to be exclusively remote or online for a student to still be considered full time (by visa requirements for international students, and I think by student loan requirements for local students). IIRC only 3-4 credits of ~15 are allowed to be an online/hybrid course. Although courses which have in-person spaces, but allow remote viewing (no interaction) are fairly common.