<p>Why is it that I always see people say that 18+ credit hours in college can be overwhelming? I mean, in high school we have to be in class for about 40 hours every week (8 hours a day, 5 days a week). It seems like 15 hours is an average amount of credit hours for college, so that's less than half the time that a high school student would spend in class every day. Is there something that I'm missing?</p>
<p>The amount of time you spend in the classroom is high school differs from the amount of time you spend in a classroom in college. All my classes in high school were an hour and a half long. While some of my classes in college run for the same number of hours+minutes, a good majority of my classes are 2+ hours long. It can be overwhelming because in college, you have to exert more work than you did in high school. I attended a UC Davis family orientation session last Monday, and one of the speakers said that incoming students should start out taking only 13 credit hours instead of 17 because the courses are much tougher than community college courses and could be stressful if they took a full load of classes.</p>
<p>There’s a LOT more work and you’re expected to do a lot more work outside the classroom, reading and such. Classes are very different.</p>
<p>I was told by many students and staff at my university that for every credit hour, expect to spend 2-3 hours studying if you want to be successful. So lets say your taking 15 hours. 15*2= 30+15= 45. That’s a MINIMUM of 45 hours a week both in class and studying for class. In college, you just listen to lectures. All of your work will be done outside of class.</p>
<p>It’s not so much the class, as the work associated with each class.</p>
<p>I go to Holy Cross, there is about 2-3 hours of work for each class. That is where it gets overwhelming.</p>
<p>And yet everyone manages!</p>
<p>Obviously, I have no idea what I’m talking about, because I’m an incoming freshman, but I’ll just put in my math. lol</p>
<p>In high school, I was in about 7-8 classes a day for a total of about 30-ish hours a week. I then went home and did about three hours of homework. That comes out to be about 45 hours of school work a week.</p>
<p>So in college, if you spend 15 hours in class and 2-3 hours outside of class (per class), that ends up being about 45-60 hours a week of schoolwork.</p>
<p>Thus, mathematically, it seems to make sense to me that 15 college hours is a lot more difficult than a full high school load, course-wise, at least.</p>
<p>I don’t know how free-time will end up working out in college, but in high school, I went non-stop in-school from 7-6 and then had the three hours of homework on top of that… so my time spent with school activities and work was actually about 70 hours a week, which would make college seem about the same time-wise.</p>
<p>15 or 18 credits does not mean you spend 15 or 18 hours in class.</p>
<p>15 credit hours doesn’t mean you’ll only be doing 15 hours of work per week. Quite the contrary, actually.
The commitment for each course is significantly more than what you do in high school. There’s more required for homework (reading and other assignments), exams, papers, etc. You must not be in college yet. Block schedules or even 8 periods a day that were about an hour a piece were cakewalks compared to having 18 credit hours, especially if a lot of that comes from science and/or math.</p>
<p>I have a question, is the formula true that one credit hour requires about 2-3 hours of outside work?</p>
<p>I’ve always heard that it’s theoretically true, but I’ve never had anyone tell me that it actually evens out to that in the end and the only college class I’ve ever taken was a complete cake walk.</p>
<p>^It depends on the class. Some of the more technical classes require even more than that, while plenty of liberal arts classes don’t. I only had to spend roughly an hour outside of class for each two class sessions studying for my History classes last year.</p>
<p>The fact that it’s more condensed than high school also makes it harder. For example, I took french in high school 1 hour a day, 5 days a week, for 9 months. I took spanish in college 2 hours a day, 2 days a week, for 5 months. Meaning I had to learn the same amount of material in about half the time. </p>
<p>Sent from my PC36100 using CC App</p>
<p>In college, my profs always tell us for 1 hour you are in class, you need to study at least 3 hours after class. The pace is a lot faster than high school, professors don’t hold your hands and help you go over everything. They don’t care if you are falling behind, you are expected to work hard and get help after class if you need to.</p>
<p>^ Yeah because college is ********. How am I suppose to learn something in a class of 300 people? Professors just talk BS during their lectures and tell us we have to spend 2-3 hours outside of class. The truth is… we don’t learn anything in class. So, we have to learn by ourselves.</p>
<p>I loved high school on the other hand.</p>
<p>In my experience so far I haven’t had to spend 3 hours outside of class for every hour in class. Far from it, closest I got to that was probably accounting.</p>
<p>No webass it really ain’t like that. You learn it in class and then reinforce it outside of class. Sit in the front and you’ll definitely learn. I would have been seriously screwed in a lot of my classes had I not gone to lecture simply because my professors have done a better job of teaching concepts than my textbooks.</p>
<p>Just last semester I had (among others)
a 3 unit class that I spent 20 hours outside of class work the entire semester (in econ)
a 3 unit class that I spent 10 hours outside of class work on a week (in cs)</p>
<p>Both were 400 level. Things can differ dramatically between courses, schools, majors, etc.</p>
<p>I’d say 2-3 hours for every unit in class is a decent average over four years, but for any particular semester or class it will be way off.</p>
<p>In high school, I learned everything in class. In college, I learned (mostly) everything by myself =/
College “class” is pure lecture. There’s nothing but lecture. For people who can’t learn by lecture and need teachers rather than lecturers, most college class is just guided self-learning.</p>
<p>
I guess that depends on the high school. I had some teachers where certain topics would only be in the book, meaning you had to do the reading and learn it on your own, and those would never be discussed/lectured in class.</p>
<p>
with that quote in regard to the comment about 2-3 hours outside of class per hour of class</p>
<p>So classes like math/sciences, etc. have more, and most liberal arts you could expect 2 hours, maybe less, per hour of class? Opinions on this?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In general, yes. Classes heavy on math require much more time and a lot more regular studying. </p>
<p>For a liberal arts class, you can often get away with concentrated work whenever an essay is coming up and have it on the backburner otherwise (not getting too far behind on the reading mind you).</p>