<p>What is the average amount of classes a Brown student takes per semester? My little booklet I got from Brown in my admissions package said that it was 30 total over the 4 years and approximately 4 classes per semester. A friend at Columbia said that typically a student will take 5, maybe 6 classes a semester. I’m just curious to see why there is a discrepancy here. Do Brown students have classes with longer sessions? Is this just the nature of the Brown curriculum?</p>
<p>Typically, students take four classes per semester. Five is the max. You’re also allowed (i think) two semesters where you can take three classes. And 30 classes is the minimum you have to pass to graduate.</p>
<p>Chances are you’ll have more work for each course than students who go to schools where more courses are standard. Chances are the time you spend in class will be less, but you’ll have more work outside of class. This does vary by course, though.</p>
<p>Here’s the table on academic standing, which essentially explains the number of courses needed each term. [Brown</a> University - Dean of the College](<a href=“Academic Policies | The College | Brown University”>Academic Policies | The College | Brown University)</p>
<p>you’ll soon find out the various way in which brown is not a real school</p>
<p>Thanks for the replies. Yeah, I saw that table Uroogla, which is what made me wonder why other schools have more classes per semester. But what you’re saying makes sense.
And Poseur, I wouldn’t mind if you enlightened me a little beforehand =)</p>
<p>My understanding is that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Penn have similar courseloads to Brown’s (on the other hand, my friend at WUSTL has 6 courses, though he seems to find them pretty easy on the whole). If you find that 4 courses isn’t enough to be challenging, you can either add more clubs/activities or take 5 courses here, so you can always do more to better match your expectations. I’ve heard the story of the occasional person who takes 5 classes and sits in on a 6th course, requesting that the professor write a course evaluation report for them even though they can’t officially get credit. I’ve found 5 courses to be a satisfactory and sufficiently challenging workload for me, but I do few activities; if I were to be active in clubs, 4 would be quite enough for me. It really varies by the course, professor, and you.</p>
<p>Edit: I was slightly off on Yale - they require 5 courses in a couple of terms.</p>
<p>Also keep in mind that at some schools, labs and other similar course offshoots are actually separate courses.</p>
<p>As to Brown not being a real school: It is what you make of it - that’s kinda the whole point. Ideally, the Admissions office should be aiming to reject those who won’t make the most of it. I think that if the sum total of what you’re doing at Brown (classes, extracurrics, etc.) doesn’t make you feel challenged, you’re failing at Brown.</p>
<p>That’s good. Do you think the students at Brown take advantage of this freedom pretty effectively? I’d imagined that they did, but calling Brown not a “real school” carried some negative connotations for me. And while I am most definitely not going to Brown solely for its curricular education, I’d also like to think that I’m not really missing out either. I don’t really know how tough a load 4 classes a semester is, but if that’s the norm at Brown and kids aren’t suffering for it, I’m not complaining. If anything it’ll make it easier to do a few other extracurriculars and still have a life on top of that.</p>
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Oh, exactly. I completely agree. Sometimes I take it a step further and say that as students at a school with so much freedom, it’s quite possible that we have the chance to challenge ourselves even more than kids at similar schools with more stringent guidelines. (Prerequisites for courses? More like… pre-guidelines! <em>jumps into a grad-level math class w/o having taken Linear</em>)</p>
<p>I do tend to ■■■■■ that “Brown is a fake school” because I think that it is treated as such by many students (whom, you’re right, adcoms should seek to detect), not to mention seen that way by some outsiders… but really, I makes fun of it 'cause I loves it. :]</p>
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Some do, some don’t. That’s really the most I can say without getting into other kids’ heads and without being more hastily judgmental than I care to be.</p>