<p>I was reading this article and I was amazed how 2 people graduated college in 2-3 semesters taking 20-30+ credits per semester. To top that off, they both graduated with double majors. That's pretty remarkable considering that most students take more than 4 years to get just 1 degree. How do you guys think they pulled it off besides having a huge boatload of credits from high school? In other words, what makes them special compared to the rest of us that allows them to handle all this and yet still do well? Has anyone had any personal experience kinda like this where they have taken more credits than normal? Just something interesting I found on the internet.</p>
<p>They are also allowed to take that many units. My school has a cap of 16 for undergrad and you can petition for more units, but the max is still 23.</p>
<p>Freshmen at my school are capped to 18 hours/semester, presumably so they’ll stay sane, I don’t think anyone else has a cap. </p>
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<p>The schools they attended must have very few gen-ed requirements, or they had a LOT of AP/IB and CLEP credit. You need at least 122 hours to graduate at my school, maybe more depending on your major.</p>
<p>EDIT: Apparently they did come in with a crapload of AP units. Which meant that had no life in high school AND college. These people are insane.</p>
<p>I think it’s dumb. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Why try to cram in as much as possible at once? </p>
<p>Fwiw, my dad’s cousin graduated from U of M in three semesters. He now has five college degrees and while he loves his life, family, and the many, many professional accomplishments, he writes books on why high school/college students should try to appreciate life when they’re younger and not try to rush through everything.</p>
<p>Well, I’m taking 21 credits this semester. I’m a sophomore and I took 20 credits each semester in first year.
I only had 8 credits from AP’s</p>
<p>I don’t think 20 is that bad even, and that’s the limit at my university otherwise you need to fill out a form simply to overload on credits.
Most standard classes are 4 credits at my school. Some of the easier ones are 3.</p>
<p>So basically it was taking:
foreign language(6) <- something I enjoy
math(4)
general ed(4)
major course (4)
elective (2) <- something I enjoy</p>
<p>My current semester:
foreign language(5) <- something I enjoy
math(3)
major course(4)
general ed(4)
general ed(3)<- something I think I will enjoy
elective(2) <- something I enjoy</p>
<p>That’s not terrible is it?</p>
<p>Doing this I’ll be able to study abroad for a year (getting a scholarship that actually saves me money and taking very little credits the whole year) and also graduate a semester early (in 3.5 years) and save myself some college costs which I’m going into debt for. I have both a major and a minor.</p>
<p>I do have a life…I have a good number of friends I can talk to/study with, I go to the gym, school clubs and socialize, university events like concerts, and restaurants, cafes, shopping. I also spend a LOT of time listening to music and watching tv series and movies on my laptop… So there’s definitely enough free time.
My sleep suffers from the irregular hours of study/free time and I often procrastinate though…</p>
<p>Sometimes I wonder if the life of a normal college student is easier~</p>
<p>Unless your reasoning is financial, I don’t understand why anyone would do something like that. I think they’d be better off doing as well as they can and finishing with a high GPA rather than finish in record speed. I think my school caps you at 19 credit hours before you need an override.</p>
<p>Not really worth that much effort. I’d say go slow and enjoy your college experience. Getting a good GPA and finding your niche is much better than exclaiming you graduated in 2 or 3 semesters.</p>
<p>My school restricted freshmen to 18 credits a semester, with no override allowed. You are allowed to go up to 25 credits a semester starting your sophomore year. You can ask for a credit override starting your 2nd year in college…BUT, my school required you to get permission from the Connecticut State Board of Education (fill out a form and have the Sec. of Education of Conn sign it) to do so.</p>
<p>At my school, you would have to pay extra tuition to take that many, so I don’t think that it would make much sense anyway. I couldn’t see myself doing something like that, and I don’t understand why they did that.</p>
<p>But if you overload on credits, it usually costs more. At my school, any credit over 16 per semester costs extra. As it is, I’m already having to take out loans even though I have about $15k in scholarships/grants. If I added 5-10 extra credits, that’s costing me more than if I waited another semester to put those on when I had more scholarships/grants coming in. On top of that, if you’re taking that many classes, there’s no way you can hold a job down too. If you can’t hold a job down, there’s no way of making extra money to reduce the amount of loans that you’re taking out.</p>
<p>I don’t know what the absolute maximum is for my school. You can sign up for 18 without an override. I got an override for 19 last semester with little trouble.</p>
<p>I’m currently doing 19 credits (the max without an override at my school) and so far it isn’t as bad as I expected it to be, maybe its because I’m a freshman taking general ed courses, but I still can’t imagine 30-40</p>
<p>You can do up to 19 credits before you need someone to grant you permission here. However, that’s not really a common number to have here because most of my classes are four credits. So, the cap is pretty much 16 and 20 with permission. Going over that you would have to pay extra. </p>
<p>I knew someone who was taking 30 units per semester and transferred out after one year. This was 2009-2010 though.</p>
<p>At MIT, a typical credit load is 4 classes or 48 credits which translates to 16 credits using normal credit hour systems. Yet, a nontrivial number of students take 6 or 7 classes per semester which is the equivalent of 24-28 credits at most schools. Even 10+ classes which would be 40+ credits at most schools is not unheard of although it’s still pretty rare. There is no reason why similar feats are not possible at most colleges either. There are no extra fees for extra credits either and no restrictions other than having sophomore or higher standing and being in good academic standing.</p>
<p>Can I ask how your translating MIT’s classes into credits? It should be something like sum<em>{lecures}((#of lecture hours per week)*(percent of semester the course occupies)) + sum</em>{labs}((#of lab hours per week)<em>(percent of semester the course occupies)</em>(1/3)). I find it hard to believe that there is a non-trivial number (say more than 40, about 0.1% of undergrads) that take 24+ credits under that standard.</p>
<p>1 MIT credit =14 hours over the semester which is approximately 1 hour per week so 3 MIT credits is roughly equal to 1 normal credit hour. A normal course load at MIT is 48-54 credits which would correspond to 16-18 credits elsewhere implying my conversion is perhaps slightly generous to MIT students but not significantly so. I’m pretty sure more than 40 students per semester [which is 1% of MIT’s student body by the way] take six or seven classes per semester although I don’t have exact data on that.</p>
<p>I am confused about your conversions… A standard courseload is 48 hours a week according to you? Is that something along the expected amount of time to be spent on work rather than the number of lecture hours? If so, let me confirm, taking 6-7 classes would yield a courseload of 72-84 MIT credits? A courseload of 10 classes is 120 MIT credits? Do you have anecdotal evidence that people take these loads? A blog or anything? You can’t link to the blog but perhaps a name and post title?</p>
<p>Our credits are limited by what major we’re in. For example, I, as a music major, would not be able to take more than 18 credits without paying something like 1100 dollars per credit. But my friends who are music education majors can take 19 without having to pay, and I’m not sure how engineers work that out.</p>
<p>The upside is that private music lessons are covered in that, because they’re paid separately, so I could technically take a bunch of lessons, and as long as the rest of my classes added up to 18 credits, I wouldn’t have to pay the fee. However, I wouldn’t want that either, because those lessons are 360/credit.</p>
<p>Yes a typical load would be 48 credits and most classes are 12 credits although some are 9 or 15 credits. Each class at MIT worth X credits is given a breakdown A-B-C where A is the number of hours of lectures per week, B is the number of hours of lab per week, and C is the expected amount of out of class time per week. A+B+C=X. You are correct about the number of credits for various course loads. Most of my evidence about this comes from personally talking to people although I searched for but could not find more complete statistics. I did find this article [The</a> story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell - The Tech](<a href=“http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html]The”>http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/dubai.html) where the author says he too 7-10 classes per semester. This article [Load</a> up on life, not classes - The Tech](<a href=“http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/editorial.html]Load”>http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/editorial.html) warns against taking such overloads and states