Does anyone expect a school to track homework by major?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Pennsylvania
1

I am just curious if any parents or students at Penn think the school should “track homework by major. Some majors have a lot of homework, some have very little in comparison.”

2

I am sorry, I wasn’t very clear. Does anyone expect the the students to have equal workloads of homework from one major to another? So a biology student, engineering student, art student should all be expected to have about the same amount of homework each night? Someone complained about some majors having too much homework and I am just curious if anyone thinks the workload between majors should be equal?

3

Not necessarily. And I never heard of college assignments referred to as “homework”. Are you still in high school?

4

No, I am quoting a parent who was complaining their daughter had more “homework” than students at a university. I am just curious what other parents and students think of this complaint.

5

No, I can’t imagine inquiring whether all majors do the same amount of homework.

“Homework” seems to be a pretty standard term - see on page 2 this econ 101 syllabus from Penn. https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/sites/economics.sas.upenn.edu/files/u4/econ1fall2016stein.pdf

Here is a Calc1 syllabus from UW-Madison describing homework.
http://www.math.wisc.edu/~jmiller/Math221/

6

I can’t imagine a parent suggesting that a university should track homework required.

I am quoting the parent “Some majors have a lot of homework, some have very little in comparison.”

7

The workloads across majors are not close to being equal. Whether they should be, that’s a debate I’ll leave for someone else.

8

Also keep in mind that the same “homework” will not take every person the same amount of time. One student may be able to whip through pages of calculus while it is a slow laborious task for another student – one student may be able to dash off a decent paper quickly while another needs to go through a series of outlines and drafts to complete the same task – one student may read faster than another etc.

Bottom line is each student has to complete the required work in his/her chosen major no matter how long it takes.