<p>I've wondered just how hard the homework assignments are, or if there's even any... I've hear stories about getting used to writing 10 paged to 30 paged research papers regularly to doing absolutely in class. What's the average homework load like? How does homework differ if you're going for a BS instead of a BA? Do certain classes have reputations for giving out unending amounts of homework? Any of those ridiculously easy fill-in-the-blank worksheets?</p>
<p>AHHH! There is none. Almost nothing is required of you except for taking tests. Everything is voluntary... keep in mind it is practice for the class material.</p>
<p>Free will rulez!!!!!!!!11</p>
<p>I do all practice just because I can.</p>
<p>I'm a liberal arts student on the quarter system. College doesn't really have "homework" as you're thinking about it. Generally, you'll be responsible for preparing (reading and studying) on average, I'd guess, a few hundred pages per week per class. Your grade will probably be based on a few tests and sometimes quizzes and a few papers. Some classes are entirely based on these papers. The longer ones have approached 20 pages rather than 30, but many are in the 3-10 page range. Some classes are all test-based. It's really dependent on the teacher.</p>
<p>Many of my classes have been at least mildly writing based, though. I did have a surprising amount of homework in a math class I took, which was typical problem set-work.</p>
<p>I've only had anything close to "fill-in-the-blank worksheets" for language classes (to help practice a difficult sort of verb conjugation, for example.)</p>
<p>Obviously it depends on what classes you take. In engineering classes (after first year) you get about 5 weekly assignments that take around 3-5 hours each. In math (after first year) you also get 5 weekly assignments that take about the same amount of time. Physics is again the same deal. First year assignments never took me that long to complete, though.</p>
<p>Other science majors aren't as hardcore with assigning homework. My chemistry and biology classes didn't even have assignments.</p>
<p>Oh yes. My friends in the engineering and sciences seemed to have weekly homework of some sort. No idea what the engineers were up to, but the sciencey people had labs to work on.</p>
<p>I'm not sure how your high school works, but at mine, science classes gave out nightly assignments. In college, you do problem sets which are generally due once a week, the idea being that you work on them throughout the week. In college you have to take a more active role managing your time. When it's the night before a problem set is due and you haven't started, you'll wish you did. We've all been there. I'm a math major, and my weekly problem sets for math typically take 10-12 hours. I only took two writing-based courses my first year, but the papers I wrote were of the following lengths:
[ul][<em>]3 pages (two papers)
[</em>]5 pages (two papers)
[<em>]8 pages (one paper)
[</em>]12 papes (two papers)[/ul]</p>
<p>You get assigned 50 difficult problems per week in science classes, and 1 book + 2 essays a week in humanities classes.</p>
<p>If you fail to complete any assignment, you fail the class. You may redeem yourself in most classes by completing an optional 100-page-single-spaced thesis for extra credit.</p>
<p>I don't get homework assignments.. i make up my own or I fail.</p>
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I don't get homework assignments.. i make up my own or I fail.
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<p>This is definitely true for many classes. I have taken several that didn't assign homework. But, I wouldn't have earned As in them had I not done homework on my own.</p>
<p>My engineering/science classes typically had problem sets every week that took 8-12 hours to do. Humanities classes typically had reading and maybe a small writing assignment now and then.</p>
<p>Engineering generally has problem sets/HW every week and some of them take a hella long time...I remember last Fall when I took Analog Electronics the HW took me a whole week to do and sometimes I didn't even finish...</p>
<p>homework is easy. any major projects/essay require 5 times more research than highschool.</p>
<p>homework is optional for most of my classes. of course, if you don't do it, you won't understand anything that is going on and fail all the in-class quizzes and fail your finals beautifully, but yes. it's OPTIONAL :D</p>
<p>Whoaa! Homework is an option? Now it really isn't like high school anymore but yeah I guess you really would need to do it so you can better understand the material and thus pass the quizzes/finals beautifully. This is why cheating is heavily condemned. Not so much because its unfair to those who worked their butte off for the grade but because you aren't learning anything and you will eventually lose when you need that knowledge for the world outside of college.</p>
<p>I wish homework was optional for my classes. I do worse in homework than tests because I hate homework</p>
<p>Sometimes stuyding just isn't enough. You need to do some practice problems (if math related) or some reading & writing for memoraization (if english related) just so it can stick in your head. But I guess that depends on what kind of a learner you are.</p>
<p>When I first got to college, I was expected to do papers about the same length as the ones I did in high school (5 - 15 pages), but where I'd be held to a higher standard. As I progressed, the papers got longer and the standards got higher. I was also expected to be able to manage with the guidance "It should be as long as you need to answer this question," which basically meant I didn't have the "training wheels" of information about how long the professor thought it should take to answer the question. I would suggest that for each class in which you are expected to write a paper, you would google "how to write a ____ paper" with the name of the discipline in the blank. You'll learn that different fields have different expectations, and if you've been very successful writing English papers you may still need to learn something to write a good hisory paper.</p>
<p>I had problem sets. I only had them in math, linguistics and logic classes, where they were fairly easy. If you're in a different kind of major than I was (and if you need to learn different things than I need to learn even today), you're probably going to get tougher sets. </p>
<p>The biggest difference for me was the reading. There is a lot of it. You can google "how to read in college" or something and turn up guides for getting the most out of the books you read while going fast. I had one professor who routinely expected you to read 3 or 4 books a week, many of them out of print and only brought up for the first time in the class period in which they were assigned. He was pretty atypical, though. 5 or 6 books per class per semester was more common for me.</p>
<p>When I was in high school, I could just read small chunks of the textbook every day and then not pay attention to what happened in class, and get As. In college, there's a lot more reading, and not all of it is going to be gone over in class. You're going to be expected to learn more and more on your own through the assigned reading as you go through -- there will be times when none of the reading and none of the subjects covered in the reading are discussed in class, and you'll have to figure out how it relates.</p>
<p>You may be interested in reading Patrick Allitt's book "I'm the Teacher, You're the Student." Allitt teaches history at Emory, and in the book he discusses one class from beginning to end. I believe it's out of print, but your library may have it.</p>
<p>You may also be interested in the book "My Freshman Year" by Rebekah Nathan (a pseudonym for Cathy Small at Northern Arizona University). Small, an anthropologist, took a sabbatical, registered as a student at her school, and moved into a dorm to study student life as a participant-observer. There's a certain amount of controversy about whether this was ethical, etc., and at least some students say she didn't get things right, but you may find it useful.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that there are a lot of students in the same situation as you and administrators put a lot of pressure on faculty to find some justification for giving almost all of you passing grades. The firing of Steven D. Aird may have driven the point home, but it was hardly the first hint anybody who teaches got.</p>
<p>Of course homework is optional.</p>
<p>Quizzes are optional.</p>
<p>Papers are optional.</p>
<p>Exams are optional.</p>
<p>As one of my teachers used to point out, in college, everything is optional.</p>
<p>But if you make certain choices, then you're also choosing to get an F.</p>
<p>It depends on the class and the school. </p>
<p>In my math class, we had assignments due 2-3x a week (mondays assignment was due wednesday, wednesday's was due friday, friday was a quiz or an assignment due monday). It was done online and consisted of 10-15 problems. We then had an optional practice problems, which I wish I would have done because they would have helped me a ton even though we never turned them in! Lesson=do optional practice problems.</p>
<p>In my chemistry class, we had optional practice problems. They were never turned in, but it was stupid of you if you didn't do them. We also were supposed to read the chapters in the book. It was like 1-2 chapters a week.</p>
<p>In other classes, we had reading assignments in the textbook that went along with our lesson. You could get by class if you didn't read them, but you still should.</p>
<p>In my English classes, we had to read the chapters in the textbook (I never did because I already know how to write papers and all that stuff) and then we had to read stories. The stories were important because we had discussions, quizzes, and essays based off of them.</p>
<p>The length of papers is generally never a good measure of their 'difficulty'. Often a 2 page paper is much harder to write than a 10 page paper... it depends on what the assignment is</p>