The amount of work listed isn’t unreasonable for a lab course. Lab courses tend to be heavy in workload, which is why it’s often recommended to try to spread them out as much as possible and try to take easier classes with really challenging labs.
I think the real problem is that she seems to be taking twice as much time in lab than she’s supposed to be taking. Forget the issue of how she’s even allowed to do this (at my school, you were only allowed in the lab within the allotted time. If you didn’t finish your lab, tough luck), but if the lab is supposed to take 4.5 hours and she’s taking 7+, then there’s a bigger issue. In my experience, labs were designed to be able to be completed in the allotted time if you knew what you were doing, came in prepared to get right to work, worked efficiently, and didn’t make any mistakes that needed you to repeat steps. Some labs were shorter than others, but even the really long ones, were designed to be completed within the lab time if you knew what you were doing. Has she really considered why it’s taking her so much longer to complete the lab? Does she have a lot of questions, does she not have a game plan before she begins the class, does she not work efficiently (like setting up other parts of the experiment during any downtime, running multiple steps simultaneously if it is possible to do so, etc)?
She should speak to her professor to see if the amount of time she’s spending in lab is expected or typical. If it’s not, then she should figure out a way to fix it. If the lab can physical only be completed in 7 hours, then that’s unfair advertising, if the lab is listed as 4.5 hours long, but I suspect that it’s perfectly possible to complete the lab within the allotted time.
As for the lab reports, it’s not unreasonable to write a lab report for every lab during the course of a semester. I have doubts that the lab reports are as impressive as you think they are because you would be surprised what many undergraduate science majors think is good or lengthy writing.
The difficult and time-consuming process of writing a publication quality paper usually isn’t the actual writing (unless the person finds scientific writing really challenging). What takes so much time and effort is coming up with the research questions, developing testable hypotheses, designing your experiments, collecting your data, troubleshooting experiments, collecting more data, analyzing your results, and possibly collecting more data. Writing up your results is often a formality once you know everything you’re going to put in it. And even then, it can be the editing process and the peer review process that eats up more time between the time you complete your manuscript and the time it’s actually published.
The vast majority of that process is cut out in lab classes. You’re working under a much more controlled environment in a lab class, and you’re often working with experiments that have previously been designed and proven. You often have some idea what what sort of results you should get. Writing the lab report really isn’t that difficult, just time-consuming if you’re a slow writer. But really, you