<p>We had a chance to visit with a Dean from CMU last week who told us the most amazing thing. He has a student who's taking 90 units of classes, basically 30 semester hours, this semester. The student's in his last semester, apparently working on completing his minor in music than anything else, and doing extremely well.</p>
<p>We were stunned. I realize the load a student can carry is related to his or her capabilities and the types of courses being taken, but I've never heard of anything like this. I'm sure they thought hard before letting him take that many classes, but I'm not sure I'd have let my S do it. </p>
<p>Anyone else aware of a student taking that many courses? What do you think?</p>
<p>They must calculate hours differently than say where my daughter attends
Her school requires 30-32 credits to graduate, CMU requires 360 units min.
I know that studio classes ( and labs) often require many more hours than other classes, perhaps that is taken into account at CMU?</p>
<p>I'm more familiar with the way of counting courses ( eg. 4 courses) than semester hours. My understanding is that, ordinarily, a student would take four courses. However, some of these courses meet only once a week, most meet twice a week, some three times a week, some meet for two hours for lecture and one hour for section; language classes meet every day; lab science classes can meet for up to 8 hours (not counting study groups), etc... I
Students are told that each hour of class generates about 3 hours of homework. This, too, varies somewhat but it's not off the mark. So 30 hours of class would generate 90 hours of homework? For a total of 120 hours of studying?
I don't think colleges do anyone a favor by allowing some students to take 30 hours of class and then go around bragging about it.</p>
<p>There was someone who posted here last year (post name Anthony), and had a newspaper article to prove it, that he took 30 to 40 semester hours per semester at Cornell and graduated in 2 years with a 3.9 GPA. At Cornell, there is no additional tuition cost, like at many places, if you take more than 17 or 18 hours a semester. It is definitely not something I would recommend.</p>
<p>I'm more familiar with semester hour system, where a typical class is counted as 3 hours (i.e., it meets 3 hours per week) and one with a weekly one hour lab or other session would be counted as 4 hours. </p>
<p>Apparently CMU roughly triples that number to get credits. Most of their classes receive 9 units credit and ones with labs, etc. receive 12. A "full" load would be 4 classes (mostly for credit on scholarships or other financial issues), 5 classes is considered normal and exceptional students can take 6 or even 7 classes with the appropriate approval. At least that's my experience and what we see in most of the universities we look at down here.</p>
<p>OK, the dean was bragging a little, but the point came when I expressed concern about my S taking too many programming/project related courses in one semester. I think the dean was a little amazed, too.</p>