We had a thread about a month ago … I think it might have been the one about which campuses moved up when you visited them and which moved down… where there was a side discussion for a while about quarters vs semesters and how many classes is typical for each. It seems like the general standard is that in a quarter (trimester)-based system you would normally take 3 classes per term or 9 per year, and for a semester-based system you’d take 4 per term or 8 per year. I know there’s variation… at Wash U, for instance, at least when I was there, I always took 5 courses/term (I think 4-5 was standard). And I know at some quarter-based campuses, most kids do 3 but it’s possible to do 4.
So… just wondering if there’s an easy way to find this information out for the 20+ schools I’m currently having my 2nd kid look at … like in one chart somewhere that someone already compiled. I’ve started poking around a little on individual websites but I’ll see statements like, “to graduate from xyz university, the student must complete 210 credits” without a handy decoder nearby saying whether every single academic course is 6 credits? 5?
In the grand scheme of priorities in choosing a school I’m sure this is on the lower end, but for a kid who has a ton of interests outside of the major area, having the flexibility to take more classes per semester /quarter would be a draw.
I’m unaware of any such thing, and would also like it. My spreadsheet has columns for:
Credits to graduate
Classes to graduate
Standard course load in credits
Standard in classes
Max without overload in credits
Max w/o overload in classes
Max with overload in credits
Max with overload in courses
And I use whatever the most common number of credits per course is. Usually the registrar or the catalog is where that information is all hidden. I’ve ignored the “you don’t need permission but do need to pay extra” category of semi-overload, but if that’s relevant to you, it’s a thing some places.
FWIW, I think that level of minutae is likely to be something that breaks ties at the end, rather than something that eliminates schools early on, for my kid. Most schools have you taking 32-40 classes as the standard load, with 12 classes a year (4 per trimester / 6 per semester) as a common upper limit.
You might want to look at drop/add flexibility, too. Being able to sign up for six classes to start with, and having more than a week or two to decide whether that’s too much, is a good thing IME. Too bad the schools with really late drop-with-no-transcript-notation dates are hard to get into!
For example, found this page for Brown: https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/registrar/degree-guidelines-0/college
Semesters, standard is 4 courses per semester but between 3 and 5 is okay, need 30 courses total over 4 years to graduate, and there’s an option for getting some credit for their winter or summer terms. And more detail on the page about AP credit. Maximum courses for undergrad is 40.
I guess I just need to find this page x 20-some, especially for the schools that are more likely than Brown.
I think for bigger schools, flagships and other state schools, it is more common to have a credit requirement to graduate (120, 130), and to figure out how many credits you need to take per semester. The average is 15, or five 3-credit courses. When I was in school some of the science classes were 5 credits (included a lab) so if you took a since, you took only 3 other classes for 14 credits. Some classes were only 1 or 2 credits. I had roommates who were Recreation majors, and they had a lot of 1-2 credit classes so often had 7 courses in a semester.
Perhaps the most common difference for this question is between colleges where all (or almost all) courses are the same size (in terms of number of credits), versus those where courses may have varying amounts of credit.
In the former case, it is common for credit requirements for the degree to be stated in terms of number of courses needed, versus the number of credits needed.
The common semester-hour credit units are sized for 120-128 credits to graduate with a bachelor’s degree, with a nominal load of 15-16 credits for each of 8 semesters. Other types of credits can be converted. For example, a semester system college that requires 30-32 courses to graduate in typical majors would have courses equivalent to 4 credits at a college using semester-hours, and 4 of them would be the normal load per semester. If 40-43 courses are required for typical majors, then each course would be equivalent to a 3 credit course at a college using semester hours, and 5 of them would be the normal load per semester.
At quarter system colleges, a quarter-hour credit unit = 2/3 of a semester-hour credit unit, so a quarter-hour college would require 180-196 credits to graduate. Conversion of systems that count by course would be done similarly to how that is done for semester system colleges.
I guess I don’t understand why this is worth exploring now.
Course load/credit load doesn’t tell you much about rigor or the actual time you need to spend on a class.
To give as extreme examples, LSE is seen to have one of the most rigorous undergraduate economics programs in the world. You need 12 credits to graduate from there (4 credits a year for 3 years, though there are some half-credit classes that are semester courses). On the other hand, Keio (one of the top unis in Japan) requires 39 core econ/stats/finance courses for their econ major + elective econ courses. Yet Japanese unis (even the top ones, except for the handful of programs that are actually looking to train students for Western PhD programs) are typically seen as 4 year vacations by the Japanese. Those 39 classes are typically just 2-credit survey classes where almost none go in to any depth. You will delve deeper in just the 12 classes at LSE, generally getting in to material that is covered at the grad school level in the US by the 3rd year there (and even some second year classes there are comparable to grad-school classes at some American colleges.
To give as another example, UIUC has one of the top CS degrees in the country and students there regularly report that a 3-credit CS class there takes several times more time and effort than a 3-credit humanities/SS class (3-5 times more).
At Northwestern, we were told (at least in some classes) that we covered as much material in a quarter as some schools did in a semester, and 4 classes a quarter was typical for engineering majors there).
@PurpleTitan Not the OP, but my kid thinks it matters because she sees college as her last chance to learn as much as possible about as much as possible. Nothing to do with rigor.
@allyphoe, “as much as possible” in depth or breadth?
At the extreme end, the Japanese unis make their students take a ton of classes, but they tend to be facile survey courses where almost nothing is covered in depth.
Meanwhile, at Harvard, you’d take only 32 semester classes total (4 each semester over 8 semesters). But do you get a lesser education there than at a non-selective quarter school where you take 60 3-credit classes?
keep in mind that some schools charge additional tuition if you take over a certain amount of credits each semester. This is no problem if you are full pay, you just write your check. But for some students on financial aid, some additional courses or courses directly not part of the degree program will not be covered by aid (and you will have to write your check).
Stanford and Northwestern are both in quarter system but at Stanford, classes typically worth between 3 and 5 units. Northwestern is weird in that virtually all classes count as 1 unit even some can be quite a bit more demanding than others. For STEM classes, each class in the intro year-long series is about 2/3 of the semester course but I think the first 2 quarters of organic chemistry cover more than 2/3 of the two semester course. The upper level science/engineering courses cover the same materials as those in semester system (so they are accelerated).
Many universities will have course catalogs online which you can peruse, but AFAIK, there is no single chart.
Not that weird. Penn is the same. Harvard counts almost all classes as 4 credit classes, whether it’s a seminar meeting 2 hours per week or a science class meeting 3 hours per week for lecture, 1 hour for recitation, and 4 hours for lab.
@PurpleTitan Breadth, because she’s a kid who doesn’t know what she wants to do when she grows up. It’s nice to be able to explore before you pick. That’s one of the great things about schools with a shopping period or a generous drop/add window, too.
As an adult, I see number of classes as less important, because I took my 38 credits and was fine. But, for example, one of the schools my kid is looking at is a trimester school with only three classes per term. She wants to pick up her heritage language in college, but between that and two required core classes, she’d only be able to have four free-choice classes in her first year, and the degree program for her current likely major recommends the three-course intro series and two math courses for frosh. Not much room for free exploration!
@PurpleTitan it’s not going to make or break a decision, for sure, but like @allyphoe, my kid has a lot of interests and there is a difference between taking 32 courses in 4 years vs. up to 40. That’s 8 extra classes that could be used to double-major, learn another foreign language, or dabble around in various things like gender studies or film that my kid isn’t going to major in but would enjoy learning about. It also means you can front-load some of the major or breadth requirements early on and have time to do semester abroad and still double major.
When my oldest was getting down to her final decision, one of her top 3 choices was UCSD, where she was admitted for human biology (I think that’s what the subheading within bio was called). We were looking at the major and breadth requirements and typical timeline and there really was not a lot of flexibility there for outside courses. IIRC she would have been able to do semester abroad but that would have left her with almost no other ‘free’ courses outside of the required ones. Not the end of the world if you go into the program certain of what you want to do, and UCSD is definitely top-notch in their bio programs, but I think my daughter just felt like she’d go into that not having many options for the next 4 years.
However, at colleges where students take more smaller courses, it is also common for the major and GE requirements to require more courses. The percentage of courses consumed by requirements is what you want to figure out to find out how much schedule space is left for free electives.
However, for a given amount of free elective schedule space, a college where students take more smaller courses may allow for more dabbling. For example, if 1/4 of the schedule (an academic year’s worth of courses) is free electives after counting major and GE requirements, a dabbler may find it more interesting at a school where this is equivalent to 15 courses than at a school where this is equivalent to 8 courses.
But also keep in mind that even for colleges that require 32 courses for graduation does not mean that a student can’t take more. Personally, I’ve taken more than the “normal” courseload every semester except my first.
Credits are deceiving I would say. There are always killer core classes, organic chem, and weed out physics classes that students may spend more than the credit hours to earn a B or A.
It may be more important to decide if a Quarter calendar will work for the student. Quarter calendars vary a little bit,
so Rose Hullman in Indiana, stretches quarter 2 over Christmas break, leaving the student with some work over Christmas some years. Most other quarter calendars start very late in September and end late, making it harder to sign up for east coast REU summer programs or government summer programs that start before the quarter calendar ends. Some students find Quarter calendars too intense and stressful, THINK: mid term/final/mid term/final/mid term/final.
Semesters are sort of more leisurely but if students load up, then not really. Some schools like Carlton College and Dartmouth U strictly limit the three course per quarter limit. Others may not, Stanford?? but you can get in trouble
quickly if you load up.
Also, look for late drop dates, which is FLEXIBLE. MIT offers one of the latest drop date that I know of, so student can actually fail the first exam and the second exam, and then bail out, and try again the next semester. If you drop too many though student may spend an extra semester to graduate, so its a double edged sword, a late drop date.
Another option that may play into decisions: Some colleges offer some pass fail grading for some classes, MIT, GaTech and Caltech offer some limited pass no credit options, so you can explore classes and not worry about getting a C or D. Swarthmore College offers a semester of pass/fail.
At some of them, there’s a limit to the more. For instance, looking at the schedule for schools my kid is maybe interested in:
Grinnell requires 124 hours / 31 courses to graduate. That’s 16 credits / 4 classes per semester, less one class for unforeseen circumstances. The maximum permissible course load appears to be 18 credits, or 4.5 classes.
Contrast with Smith, which requires 128 hours / 32 courses to graduate, but permits 24 credits (6 classes) per term. And has no distribution requirements, if that’s your thing - my kid is indifferent to them because she has wide-ranging interests and “I’d probably take all those classes anyhow.”
Looking outside her list, at the Ivy end, Brown caps total classes at 40 (average of 5 per term). At Yale, you could probably take 46 (5 per term as a frosh, requiring no permission, then 6 thereafter, requiring a relatively low level of permission), although the theoretical limit is 56 (7 per term).
At the public end of things, my parents still tell me about their days at Michigan State, where they’d take 30 credits each term Fall and Spring, and 20 in the summer, as STEM majors (uphill both ways in the snow, get off my lawn). My current state’s flagship appears to allow up to 19 credits / 6 classes with no special permission.
The nice thing about Yale and other schools with a ‘Shopping period’ is that students can sign up for more classes and keep the ones they like best after a 2 or 3 week period.
But, for example, one of the schools my kid is looking at is a trimester school with only three classes per term. She wants to pick up her heritage language in college, but between that and two required core classes, she’d only be able to have four free-choice classes in her first year, and the degree program for her current likely major recommends the three-course intro series and two math courses for frosh. Not much room for free exploration!