a few questions..

Colleges and Universities A-Z Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
1

<p>How much homework do students usually have per night? Per weekend night? Do they still have a reasonable amount of time left over for dinner, hanging out with friends a little, etc, or are you routinely staying up until midnight to finish everything?</p>

<p>What are the classes like? Do they generally meet every day? every other day? How long is each class?</p>

<p>Lastly, I've heard that at some engineering schools, every test is designed so that everyone fails it, and then the grades are VERY heavily curved. What are tests like at Rose Hulman?</p>

<p>Thanks!</p>

2

<p>[How much homework do students usually have per night?]</p>

<p>It really varies on the class and the day. Two of my classes are very project-based, so if you get your projects done quickly you don’t have much homework. One of my classes has daily homework - maybe 45 minutes a day. Making a <em>very</em> rough estimate, I would say for me it is averaging maybe 1.5 hours of homework a day. It will be different for different majors and different years, though. And I think my load is a tad light right now.</p>

<p>[Do they still have a reasonable amount of time left over for dinner, hanging out with friends a little, etc, or are you routinely staying up until midnight to finish everything?]</p>

<p>If you don’t waste it, you have plenty of time for those things. I have enough time for 8 hours of sleep every day, easy…but I make schoolwork a priority. If you get back from classes and hang out until 9PM, then start your homework, you might be up until midnight. Certainly there are days when everything seems to pile up at once - but it isn’t like that every day or even the majority of days. You can still have a life outside of school.</p>

<p>[What are the classes like? Do they generally meet every day? every other day? How long is each class?]</p>

<p>Generally your classes are 50 minutes long, and meet four times a week. There are a lot of exceptions: CS classes usually meet for two periods (1 hour 40 minutes) three times a week and classes with labs meet three times a week with one three-hour lab, for example. Usually your lectures are either one period or two periods, and your labs are three periods. Not every technical class has labs, but a lot do.</p>

<p>[Lastly, I’ve heard that at some engineering schools, every test is designed so that everyone fails it, and then the grades are VERY heavily curved. What are tests like at Rose Hulman?]</p>

<p>I haven’t had any of those classes, but I have heard from some ME friends about certain classes that have brutal tests w/ curves. But I think that’s pretty isolated and the exception - not the rule. I’m in my second year right now and haven’t had one test like that.</p>

3

<p>I am a Jr. Chemical Engineering Student at Rose.</p>

<p>For almost all of my upper level classes I have 1-2 homework assignments a week per class. Each assignment takes about 4-8 hours depending on the class. This is really dependent on your major though.</p>

<p>Weekends are pretty open and my roommates and I usually go out for dinner on weekends but Sunday through Thursday nights are pretty busy if you are involved on campus at all and there is not a lot of free time unless you are willing to sacrifice. Most students sacrifice sleep for some enjoyment during the week. I usually end up starting my homework after practice and intramurals around 11 pm and usually finish between 2-3 am and then wake up for class every morning at 8am. Most students go to bed around 12:30 - 2:30 am. Also campus is dead on weekends before noon cause everyone is asleep.</p>

<p>For the most part the number of credit hours is the number of hours the class meets per week except four labs where 3-4 lab hours is equivalent to 1 credit hour. Most classes meet every weekday except Wednesday an exception to this is Calculus freshmen year. As for class size the biggest class I ever had was 35 students and the smallest was 6 and I have had at least 5 classes with under 15 students.</p>

<p>In my experience most test are designed so that the test average is a 75 but almost students get at least a 70 but very few get above 85. This is also very dependent on your major. Also I have never had a test curved if the class average is below what it should be most instructors will have the students retest over the material (i. e. the final will will replace your lowest score of the three or four tests) or have a take home correction of the exam where students can earn partial credit back.</p>

<p>A word of note as well: A lot of larger schools with engineering programs have weed out courses where they try to get students with poor performance to switch majors. At rose there are no weed out courses but there are courses that if your performance is too low you will have to retake. Most of the engineering Departments have one or two courses like this for Chemical Engineering it is Thermodynamics which students sometimes have to take two to three times before they can move on.</p>

4

<p>Hi John,
I am an admitted student, very proud with just a few more pending admission decisions ahead of me. RHIT is among the top choices of course.
Could you go on a little bit more about the “weed out” class concept? I don’t quite understand if you meant that a particular subject was simply very difficult, or that some schools diabolically grade particular subjects 100 times harder and/or unfairly.
Thanks.</p>

5

<p>I am not going to mention any schools in particular but from what my friends at other universities have told me about introductory engineering courses is that they are specifically designed to be difficult in an effort to get students out of the engineering program. For example one of my friends at another university was taking an engineering course where half of the class didnt pass so he ended up switching to Business. Also when you visit larger colleges what they tell you is how many students end up graduating but what they dont tell you unless you ask is how many end up graduating with an engineering degree. One of the colleges that I visited said that 80 percent of the students enrolled in the engineering program earned the degrees from the school but when asked how many graduated with engineering degrees the number was closer to 20 percent.</p>

6

<p>Can somebody enlighten me about " move on" ? Can you move on and take next level of the course even though you only get a “D or D+”? I know Rose is very tough on grading. I think that why it is worth the effort. Thanks.</p>

7

<p>As John states, there are classes that students just know are going to be the toughest they will ever take. Sometimes students get the professors permission to just sit in on a class for a term and then formally take the course later to ensure they are as prepared as possible to be successful. Some students don’t want a grade lower than (fill in the blank) to appear on their transcript so the threshold for “moving on” will be different for every student.</p>

<p>Jared Goulding
Assistant Director of Admissions
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology</p>

8

<p>@apple192 I wouldn’t say that Rose is tough on grading. The grades from what I have seen represent a few things. The first is intelectual ability for what imo is about 20% of the grade. The second is the work put in which I would say will make up 50% of your grade. The last 30% seems to come from you being willing to get help when you need it. Whether this is from your instructor or a friend or a tutor get the help you need as soon as you have a problem. If you do those three things you should be able to maintain a 3.5 or better gpa no problem.</p>

9

<p>Thanks for the answers. I ,as a parent, agree with you wholeheartedly. What I meant “tough” is you have to study. This is not a school where there is always a floor to catch you even if you perform poorly and seek no help. You have to earn your grade and in return You are going to be proud of yourself. IMO.
An ivy we toured has a policy that everybody has to graduate in 4 years, even though it is a engineering department–this is what I heard from the tour-guide.</p>