“I’m guessing students have been reluctant to complain”
Complain about what?!?
I’m disturbed by this trend of people complaining about harsh grading and amount of work required.
This is college folks. It isn’t supposed to be easy, there will be classes that require a lot of work and there will be classes that don’t require much work at all.
I can’t imagine the TA’s being willing to let students dawdle twice as long in a lab- or a good department structuring labs needing extra in class time. I DO remember how many extra hours we chemistry majors spent in class/lab in addition to the homework. I still see the same credits/hours in today’s schedules online. Organic second semester lab course was 2 credits with two 41/2 hour lab periods per week. No TA would let you stay longer- they wanted to leave at the end of the day (or Saturday morning- the only good thing about that Fri/Sat lab was we could keep our setups instead of having to clear the bench for the next class). That was/is a top ten Chemistry department.
What constitutes “a ton of work” depends on the student. For some math/science classes are very difficult while for others writing papers is harder- that’s one factor in choosing a major. One’s relative ability and knowledge base also make it easier/harder.
Labs are a lot of work, but I think the writing is different/easier than it would be for a journal article. Much of it would be presentation of experiment data, good practice for the real world.
It’s very common to have a science class broken into 3credit/class + 1credit/lab. But generally students will say that the lab part took more time and work. Often all 4 credits are required.
When I was in college, I had 2-4 labs per week for most semesters and those were only 1 credit each and each one took 4-8 hours. I remember several times I missed dinner as the cafeteria was closed by the time I finished the lab. This is not uncommon for science major particularly if you also have a second major or minor in science too like me.
Except at places like MIT & Caltech which try to give credit by amount of work they think is required, 2 courses that have wildly different workloads could have the same amount of credit.
It’s not uncommon for some CS classes to require 20-30 hours of work per week (students typically try not to take more than 2 of those per term and mix in some classes with lighter course loads). Music majors spend a ton of time practicing and on their craft overall. Meanwhile, some lib arts (non-science) majors (in non-elite schools, generally) may spend 10-15 hours total per week (outside of classes) on all classes. Yet they may be earning as much credit in a term as a STEM or music major spending 60+ hours per week on schoolwork.
That’s just the way it is.
The “credit hour” system (where 120-128 credits are needed to graduate, and 15-16 credits are taken per semester) is supposed to have a mapping of 1 credit = 3 hours of work per week (total, including in-class and out-of-class time). But it is common for this not to be accurate, with many courses being significantly less, but courses with labs, etc. being more. A 1 credit lab-only course that meets for 3 hours in the lab is a very obvious example – 1 credit is supposed to mean 3 hours per week, but then the student has to read stuff before the lab and write up the lab report afterward, making it more than 3 hours per week.
Note that, among STEM subjects, math is often relatively low in workload, unless the student finds the material so intellectually difficult that s/he takes a lot of time for that reason (courses like real analysis and abstract algebra tend to have a reputation of very high intellectual difficulty).
Ho hum, a class with a lot of work. Just like CS courses. Yawn.
My daughter did say that her computer engineering course was the most time consuming.
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
Although I didn’t take it, there’s an organic chemistry class at my school that has lecture from 1:30-2:45 and lab from 3:00-5:00 every Monday and Wednesday. I have a physics class that meets for three hours twice a week this semester.
I think those are the longest classes I’ve seen at my school.
Are you sure those numbers are accurate? That seems very excessive. Is this a regular thing, or has it only happened once or twice?
edit - The greatest number of papers I’ve had to write for a single class is five, in English Composition I.
this is normal…
if you don’t like science lab work, perhaps a different major would be better.
that said, I agree with the above poster that your kid should be able to complete the lab quicker.
does no one have any classes after the lab that they need to be at?
@soccerguy315
It might be normal but it’s not sane.
All the students stay till that time so no, my student can’t finish it quicker.
They stay until 10 pm. No classes after that.
You can enjoy and excel in lab work and be overwhelmed with a class.
@baktrax everyone is staying 7 or 8 hours. Apparently, the course catalog times do not reflect reality.
And apparently writing these lab reports are difficult. These are advanced labs. Writing a journal paper was easier because it was a topic that the student knew rather than an experiment in completely new topics.
6 papers 10-15 pages each ; I believe figures are not included.
Has your daughter actually thought of concrete reasons why the labs take so long and then asked the professor about it? The vast majority of students in labs I took would have stayed longer if allowed to, but that doesn’t mean the lab was inordinately long. Sometimes, students who aren’t comfortable with lab work take long for many different reasons. What are your daughter’s reasons? If they are out of her control, she should speak to the professor. If they are in her control, she should still talk to her professor to discuss strategies she can try to reduce the amount of time she spends in lab.
The point of the class is for her to learn about these new topics. If she’s taking so long on the lab reports because she doesn’t understand the material, then that’s a different issue. What materials does she have to prepare for to prepare for the lab? In my experience, you should know most of what you’re going to write in a lab report by the time you finish the lab. Trust me, as someone who has been there, done that, writing a lab report for a class is not harder than producing a publishable paper for a well-respected journal.
What I have noticed is students when faced with unreasonable work loads in a class often chose to take it another semester. There are only some many hours in a day and kids need to learn to choose their classes wisely to optimize the use of their time. Learning should not be a game about who is most macho but a steady path toward gaining knowledge and wisdom
??? Is 20-30 hours per week for a class “sane”?
Yes, this class can be said to have a heavy workload, but 15 hours of labs a week should be manageable.
Just wondering, what will you do the first time your daughter’s manager asks her to work 60 hours a week?
Which science class? Maybe there is an issue with sharing equipment that make the class take longer?
Some CS courses with programming assignments have a reputation of taking up very large amounts of time, even if they do not have scheduled lab sessions.
If a student at the school normally takes 4 courses per term, then 1 course would be equivalent to 4 credits in the more usual system. This is supposed to mean 12 total hours of work per week. If the normal course load is 3 courses per term, then 1 course would be equivalent to 5 credits in the more usual system, corresponding to 15 total hours of work per week.
Of course, as noted in your other thread, lab courses often exceed the nominal number of hours per week.
Usually labs go faster with some collaboration among friends.
I’m curious what lab science class this is.
This is also second semester…is this a continuation of a course from last term with different expectations?