Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

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> A 3-credit class is 3 hours in the classroom per week, plus additional time outside of class.

The usual rubric I've seen is that each credit class in the normal system is 3 hours total time per week, the most common arrangements for that 3 hours/credit are 1 hour lecture + 2 hours assumed out-of-class time for 1 credit, or 3 hours lab for one credit (this may be combined in a lecture + lab course, which might have 10 credits for 5 hours of weekly lecture, 10 hours of presumed out-of-class time accompanying the lecture, and 15 hours of weekly labs.)

A quick check of some online college course catalogs confirms that this appears to be approximately the usual rubric (at least to the extent of 1 hour lecture/week = 1 credit, 3 hours lab/week = 1 credit; the assumed out-of-class time for lecture is not explicit in any catalogs I can find.)

So, depending on the mix of lecture and lab (and assuming no less-common patterns are involved), and assuming (as you do with the division by 5) that all the in-class time involved is on weekdays, 17-21 credit hours corresponds to somewhere between 3.4 and 12.6 hours a weekdays of in-class time.

So, 8 hours per day of in-class is not inconsistent with a 17-21 credit load, but it would be a higher lab-to-lecture ratio in terms of credits.

I don't think your unequivocal statement that the in-class time is inflated by a factor of 2 is justified.

Given the author of the article stated that he was a linguistics major, please speculate on the labs that this person might have taken.

My minor in cognitive science was administered by a three-way alliance between the computer science, linguistics, and psychology departments, and nary a one of them required more time in the classroom per week than the number of credit hours. None. The psych professors, of course, dragooned their students into the psych testing pool for a maximum of two hours per semester, but that was not graded, nor in a classroom.

My chemistry lab sections were all 1 credit-hour, and we spent more time than that every week in the chem lab, which I am willing to count as a "classroom" for the purposes of extending the benefit of the doubt.

Classroom time = lecture + 3 x lab . So in order to be in class 8 hours per day, or 40 hours per week, we get this system of equations:

  40 = lec + 3 x lab
  21 = lec + lab

  lec = 21 - lab
  40 = 21 + 2 x lab
  19 = 2 x lab
  9.5 = lab, 11.5 = lec

Wow, that's a lot of lab sections. When I got my chem minor, each 3-hour lecture section had an accompanying one-hour lab section. The work done in it overlapped substantially with the out-of-class work expected for the lecture.

You didn't do very much homework for the lecture section. You mostly did the lab work from the lab section. Rather than doing your homework in the dorm, you did it at the bench or the fume hood. So even if you counted time in the lab as "in the classroom", that's still 4 credit-hours for the class, 3 in the lecture, 3 in the lab, and maybe up to six in your room if you really had trouble understanding the material.

So I still have to wonder how someone studying linguistics in general and Maya in particular managed to rack up so many hours "in the classroom" per week.

Degree requirements: http://www2.ku.edu/~distinction/cgi-bin/degree-requirements4...

Course catalog: http://www2.ku.edu/~distinction/cgi-bin/6254

I was unable to identify any possible lab sections other than possibly LING120: The Physics of Speech, for 4 credit-hours, and maybe LING 980: Linguistics Field Work, which seems unlikely for an undergrad. Everything else looked like lectures.

Are you just winding me up here? Nobody takes half their course load as labs. Even if you did all hard science classes, you're still only going to end up with no more than 25% your course load credit-hours as lab sections [as an undergrad], which gets you maybe 6 hours "in the classroom" per day. That's still not 8. I don't think you can convince me that number is not bullshit without the author's actual class schedule.

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