<p>As a prospective student, I have done a little browsing and I’ve found from the Brown catalog that a student sometimes needs to register for 6 sections? (Lecture, lab, meeting, etc) What are they and are they similar to recitation where it is not counted towards GPA?</p>
<p>What are lab courses like? I heard from my Brown alumni that lab courses and lecture are weighed equally towards GPA (1 unit). Would that mean most labs are 3 hour labs (since most lectures are 3 hours/week? </p>
<p>In general, how are Brown’s lab courses (bio lab/chem lab/physics lab) in terms of rigor compared to the lecture? Would registering for an introductory chemistry class require also registering for physics lab class?</p>
<p>Finally, would it be possible to place out of a lab course (from having lab credit at a state university) but still enroll in its corresponding lecture class?
EX: Taking introductory chemistry (Chem 0100) without introductory chemistry lab?</p>
<p>Also, don’t students usually take 4 credits/semester? </p>
<p>In that case, do most Brown premed freshman take (in one semester) mostly just biology and chemistry (as well as their corresponding labs) for a total of 4 credits/semester? It seems a little less coursework or am I a bit off?</p>
<p>Every class is 1 class, period. There are no hours or credits at Brown. Labs are always taken with a class and they are considered to be a portion of that course. Regardless of the complexity of registration, you will be in class 3x a week for 50mins each or 2x a week for 1hr and 20mins AND you will also have a 50min prelab + 4hr lab once a week. At least, that’s how it has been done for years-- not sure if it’s changed at all recently.</p>
<p>All of those “hours” are still 1 class. You cannot register to do the class one semester and do the lab later or vice versa.</p>
<p>Modestmelody, thanks for the information! Wow, so if one takes two labs a semester then thetwo labs would be like 3 lecture courses. That sounds a bit intimidating, haha; do labs (in terms of coursework) usually take more time than lecture?</p>
Not <em>quite</em> true. The biology department is considering giving a 1/3 or 1/2 credit for labs now, though it hasn’t happened yet. The CS department has been going back and forth about giving a 1/2 credit for the TA program, although that seems to have fallen out of favour.</p>
<p>Less relevant is that several music courses can be taken for a half credit, and a couple language courses are double credit.</p>
<p>As a general rule, though, what modestmelody said is right - if you take CHEM0330, you receive 1 credit for doing everything, including the exams, the lab, and so on. All of these factor into the one grade you receive for the course. Therefore, lab sciences are rather time intensive - labs may be 4 or more hours - but you receive the same credit for them as pretty much anything else…at least until the biology department changes.</p>
<p>As an aside, Brown does not calculate a GPA for its students. Therefore, at least nominally, course weightings do not matter in the same way that they might at some other schools.</p>
<p>It’s true the chorus, wind ensemble, and the OS class has a 1/2 credit lab. This is by far not the norm.</p>
<p>However, I don’t know that the CCC would change to allow giving credit for labs. At least while I was on it, that was not an idea that I believe they were open to. In fact, I’d probably be hostile toward it (and when you consider some of the ramifications, like decreasing the number of course you could take in a semester, I bet you would too, Uroogla).</p>
<p>It’s not uncommon for a Brown student studying science to have a semester or two with three lab sciences at once.</p>
<p>I am completely opposed to such an endeavour too - as a computer science TA who thought he could not be a TA next term due to the requirement to TA for course credit, I was upset with this. (There were other reasons involving what I’d be paid, about which I was upset, but those are beyond the scope of this discussion. It will suffice to say that serving as a TA for a full course credit will be permitted based on a variety of factors, but presumably not required.) Many bio students seem to be lauding this maneuvre, though, since they feel that students would overwhelm themselves by taking 3 lab courses in a semester with 5 courses. I definitely see the argument against that (students should be able to take what they can handle, and the Dean of the College has pretty explicitly said that no overrides to allow more than 5 courses would be permitted for cases like these would be granted). On the other hand, Brown considered 1 course to be 4 credit hours, and many schools charge extra for taking above 18 credit hours, which include labs. In that sense, Brown already is generous with respect to how much students can do. But that’s just me playing Devil’s Advocate - I don’t support the measure.</p>
<p>Believe me I’m with you for all the reasons stated and alluded to and a few more. Basically, I think this is just premeds who don’t actually want to study science complaining. I’ve taken classes with labs that were less work than social sciences and vice versa. I actually think our system is as close to fair as it gets. The expectation that each class is a 1/4 of your work load, period, makes it pretty easy to gauge what’s an appropriate level of difficulty. Imagine the range in quality we’d have with even more levels to distinguish between.</p>