Columbia Ed.

<p>How many freaking books do you read at Columbia your first year!? I was looking online and noticed something like 50-something books for the contemporary civilization alone not mention you have to take, art, music, literature, college writing, P.E, science,frontiers of science, a language, and major cultures...phew.
On average how much homework would you say there is in a week (in hours please). How many books are you supposed to read a week, 4!? Last, how in depth would you say the analysis is of the different books, because of the long list it would seem like it would be very superficial.
Thanks for taking the time to read my question and thanks in advance for the answers!</p>

<p>Calm down. If you actually read the web site, you'd know that you take Lit Hum, UW and frontiers the first year, Contemporary Civ your sophomore year. The rest you distribute over your 4 years. Also, art and music hum and UW don't require books. </p>

<p>You don't actually read all the books, some of them are optional and up to the teacher's discretion. Also, the speed depends on the teacher. I found I usually read a book a week on average: not always the whole thing, when I didn't like what I was reading, I usually ignored it. Also, sometimes you just read selections. </p>

<p>HW in a week? I don't know...that depends on what classes you take. It would probably come to 2-4 hours a day if you actually worked everyday. I usually clocked more because everything was so last minute. But then again, there were days when I did no work :)</p>

<p>thanks, i didn't read all on the website like i should've. I was just assuming that all of this was done freshman year and i was like "are you serious?!". Thanks for elucidating the core at columbia!</p>

<p>For homework I usually tell people 3-8/9 hrs a week per class [assuming you don't already know the material beforehand]. This doesn't include 4.5 credit classes like phys 2800s which straddle 15-20 for some people. But I've taken a 3 credit class [micro-econ with susan elmes] which had us do 8 hrs of homework a week. she allows 3 kids to hand in one assignment, but if you only do a third you only understand a third. Multiply this by 4-6 classes and you get anything for 15hrs of homework a week to 40-50 on a bad semester. you usually add this to 15 hrs of classes and it ends up being 30 -50 hrs of work on average if you want to do reasonably well. I assume you understand the factors that make this vary considerably so I won't go into details.</p>

<p>This coupled with [hopefully] some ec involvement means that playing too many videogames will see you do badly, and it means that if you bust your a$$ you can do very well.</p>