<p>I read somewhere that students should study 3 hours per week for every credit they are taking. Does anyone here actually do this (on average, of course)? How many credit hours are you taking?</p>
<p>I'm (hopefully) planning on going to college next fall. My top school that I'm looking at doesn't charge tuition for anything over 12 credit hours per semester. They allow students to take up to 18 credit hours per semester. Since it would be free, I would probably end up taking the 18 credits. </p>
<p>The only problem is that would mean I should study 54 hours per week. Add that to 18 hours in class, and I'd spend 72 hours on school work. I'd like to have time to have a part-time job, be involved in some extracurricular activities and clubs, go to church, and volunteer on a regular basis. Would this be overextending myself or is it somehow doable?</p>
<p>I'm just wondering if the 3 hour guideline is realistic. Has anyone ever heard of any other guidelines?</p>
<p>I study until I understand the material. Sometimes that takes a while and sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t set a timer or anything. I would suggest taking it a little easier your first semester while you get settled and start getting a feel for college.</p>
<p>It depends on what the 18 hours are, how much background you have in the material, and how brilliant you are in those subjects compared to your classmates.</p>
<p>Totally depends on you and the classes we are talking about…</p>
<p>Generally (and this is from my experience, so results may vary) soft science courses (econ, history, english, psych etc) only required about an hour per week per class for me. Sure there were times that you’d have to put a little more work in on the weekends for papers and stuff, but on average of actual “studying”, I’d say it averaged out to an hour or 2 per week.</p>
<p>Hard sciences, however, required much more of my time. When I took Chemistry (I’m not very good at it) I spent a couple hours every night doing the homework and studying.</p>
<p>18 credits is quiet a load your first semester and you are kinda playing Russian roulette, but totally do-able if it fits your personality/intelligence. I knew someone who did 20-30 credits a semester + summers and graduated in 2 years with a 3.6gpa (he was a beast, I still don’t know how he even managed to fit all those classes into a week schedule).</p>
<p>My last recommendation if you do go for 18 credits, try to fill that with as few classes as possible. From my experience 1 credit classes can often assign the same amount of work as 3 credit classes…</p>
<p>It really depends on the class and the person. I’m taking 16 units this quarter, but classes just started a couple days ago so I can’t give an accurate answer based on my current schedule.</p>
<p>I took 17 units in the spring, and I’d guesstimate that I spent ~25-30 hours studying and doing work every week. However, ~20 hours of that was for my software development class (4 units) and ~5 hours of that was for German (5 units). I spent between 3 and 5 hours doing problem sets for calculus (4 units). Then there was my religious studies class (4 units), where I only spent about an hour total each week doing readings.</p>
<p>In my experience, the general rule of thumb is that STEM and foreign language classes are the most likely to be close to following the 3 hour rule, or depending on the class going over that number. Social sciences classes that involve a lot of data sets (linguistics and economics come immediately to mind, but I’m sure there’s others I’m forgetting) tend to be next up depending on how much of a “natural” you are at learning to interpret them. Humanities classes don’t tend to take up that much time in my experience (barring some really long readings), though you’ll likely have weeks where you have a paper to write that bumps up the total amount of time you spend on that class temporarily.</p>
<p>My advice: Just study as much as you need to for any given class. Plan for the 3 hours per unit rule initially, then adjust for each class as necessary. If you can get a good grade in the class with a certain amount of studying, there’s no real reason to increase the amount of study time for that class just to meet an arbitrary rule.</p>
<p>On a different note, for your credit hours it’s probably a good idea not to do the 18 your first semester. I’d suggest starting at 15 your first semester and adding on in later semesters to make sure you don’t overwhelm yourself.</p>
<p>like the other posts said, it depends. in my experience it’s less then what the recommended time is to for study for a class, but i’m a fast reader and i’m good at writing. and that’s if you are trying to get an A, if you’re okay with a B you can study even less.</p>
<p>like for example, in my astronomy 101 class i would study the text book and study my notes for about a hour 30 min every day. the days before the tests, i would study for about 4 hours. but in my chemistry class, the teacher would give us a practice test 3 days before the test that was almost identical to the test, so i would skim read the text book and on the 3 days before the test, i would study the practice test for about 4 hours the first 2 days and on the night before i studied for about 7 hours. </p>
<p>it depends on the class and the teacher you have.</p>
<p>As everyone else has said, it really depends on the classes. I was in an Intro to the Humanities class last semester that I probably spent about 1-2 hours a week on tops. But, we also had a huge research project for our final that ended up being like 40 pages. That took quite a while to complete, but I didn’t really start working on it until the last few weeks of the semester.</p>
<p>This semester, I’ve got 21 credit hours of basically all science classes. I’ve got Calculus, General Chemistry, General Physics, Intro Anthropology, and beginning Spanish. </p>
<p>Calculus, Chemistry and Physics all require a decent amount of time spent on problem sets. I don’t actually have any assigned homework to turn in, but the practice problems can take up a lot of time. I spend a few hours per night on at least one of the three. Anthropology is a lot of reading. There are only four unit exams in the course, so once I’m done with the 5-6 chapters that are assigned for each given unit, I don’t really have anything to do for Anthro, aside from reviewing my notes. Spanish requires a decent amount of practice, but admittedly I’m not quite as passionate about that class as the rest, so I tend to procrastinate studying it until I’m down to the wire. I’ve usually been able to cram for it pretty quickly though.</p>
<p>I don’t really know how many hours per week I spend studying for each class. Definitely not the 3 hours per credit hour recommendation though. If I did that, I’d be spending 63 hours a week studying, on top of the 21 hours that I’m in class. With 168 hours in a week, with 21 hours spent in class, and roughly 49 hours spent sleeping, that barely even leaves enough time to study that much…unless I wanted to have absolutely NO leisure time.</p>
<p>You’ve just gotta feel your classes out. They’ll all be different.</p>
<p>I’d say on average I do about 3 hours/class hour. So 2 hours outside of class per hour in class. This is highly variable though. Some classes it’s under an hour/class hour (so I don’t go to class and all the work takes less time than sitting in class), and some classes I’d say it’s as high as 5-6 hours/class hour.</p>
<p>You’re misunderstanding that rule of thumb though. It’s meant to include class time. So it’s so say that you should spend 2 hours outside of class for every hour you spend in class.</p>
<p>3 hours of work per week per credit unit is considered the standard amount of work. Note that this includes both in-class time and out-of-class reading and preparation. So a typical 15 credit unit schedule is supposed to be about 45 hours of work per week, of which about 15 hours is typically in-class time.</p>
<p>However, courses with labs, large term projects, art studio, music performance, etc. can consume considerable amounts of time, even if the credit unit count does not reflect that.</p>
<p>3 hours per week per credit? Sounds about right. But really you wouldn’t want to spend more time studying material you think you completely got when you could focus on other materials.
You should just studying until you got it.</p>