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In Finland the universities (and I believe in many other European universities have/had this as well) there was "academic quarter" which meant that if something was scheduled for 10am it would actually start at 10:15am. IIRC if they used precise time (10:00) then it would actually start at that time.

I've heard it dates back to when people didn't have easy access to precise time. It would allow students to hear the hourly bells and walk to the class.

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Same in Germany. Times are usually assumed to be ct (cum tempore) and start XY:15. When something starts sharp, it's specified as st (sine tempore).

It also allows you to have "1 hour" classes that are at 10am and 11am, and you aren't forced to leave early or arrive late. A 5m gap isn't enough for huge numbers of classes in many campuses.

How much can you actually do in 1 hour that’s 45 minutes long?

All my classes were 1.5 hours long. Yet professors still regularly chose to introduce new material on days with back-to-back classes, leaving standalone classes for practice or “less important” topics.

>How much can you actually do in 1 hour that’s 45 minutes long?

Almost exactly as much as one that's 55 (or 60) minutes long but many people are late to.

But yes, "1 hour" is fairly short for any deep topic progress. I vastly prefer classes that are 2 or 3, it gives time to have questions and not be in a blind rush.

We usually had 2 hour classes starting ct, some of them with another 10 minute break.

In Poland "academic quarter" has a sense that if the teacher didn't show up and it's 15 minues past, the students can leave. They still need to show up for the class at 00 every time and are scolded to varying degree if they showed up after the teacher started which they do right after they arrive.

... so the old American high school "if the teacher is 15 minutes late, we're legally allowed to leave" meme has some roots in reality? Huh.

I guess it was the same in Poland and in America. It was never formally announced. Just sort of unwritten cultural norm.

Never heard of that in high school but my university's student handbook explicitly stated that if the professor did not show up within ten minutes of the scheduled start time, the class was officially cancelled for that day. I only remember that happening once, maybe twice, during my academic career. A few times they cancelled a class ahead of time but no-shows were extremely rare.

At my university in New Zealand they didn't take attendance for lectures. You attended the lectures so you could learn stuff so you could pass the exams. It's surprising that isn't considered normal.

(There's some nuance to that statement as science courses tende to have labs - I don't remember why first-year physics was a requirement for software engineering, but it was - mathematics courses tended to have weekly assignments, and at least one software course had a very unusual style of putting us in a room one whole day per week for a semester to work on group projects.)

That's how it was for me in college in the USA.

As an aside, it's a little absurd that people wouldn't go to class given how much money they're paying.

Private colleges are around $39k USD per year. That's a lot of dough per class-hour.

For NZ citizens to go to university it's only around $5k NZD per year and most degrees are only three years, except for a few which are four.

That's the thing though, in many places Europe people usually aren't paying much for university, and higher education is funded by the state. So the state has a keen financial interest on people not failing/doing over because they can't be bothered to go to lectures, a lot more than the students themselves.

The reality in my experience is that, whilst students are on paper adults (mostly) and responsible for their own successes and failures, a significant number benefits from being forced to attend. That's unfortunate for the ones that could "safely" skip the lectures and have to go, but on average it leads to better overall outcomes. So in that regard the attendance policies are sensible.

I only paid 50 bucks per month to study at university — there were many classes I never visited only wrote the exams

I was lax about going to certain classes. Not always because of laziness (though, I'll admit it was occasionally a factor) but often because the format of one person, who lacked any particular talent for teaching, reading mostly from notes or scribbling incomprehensible symbology on a blackboard in a room filed with hundreds of people wasn't really a teaching format that did anything for me.

Hm, I had good teachers who were also researchers in their respective fields. Mostly. I wonder if this is another symptom of the USA's general hypernormalization - sounds like they're going through the motions, without the substance. They're using distilled water in the hydroponic supply.

I confirm, we have it in Italian universities (it's called "quarto d'ora accademico" in Italian).

This thread is absolutely fascinating — American, never heard of this practice (esp ct/st), and desperately want it in my life now!

For the most part, American Universities were established after railroad time tables were a thing…and in the US Latin and the other liberal arts were never the primary curriculum at most US universities, so cum tempore might as well be Latin.

Yep I even had one professor who locked the door at the start of class. You either had to pound on the door to get in or accept defeat. Most people just walked away unless it was an exam day

UC Berkeley had this as well, at least as of the class of 2010. I think it was called "berkeley time" or something along those lines.

A bit different in Russia and Ukraine, there's a notion of "academic hour" which is 45 minutes. Same idea though.

Yes except classes in schools usually start at X:00 and breaks between them are X:45 - (X+1):00. The first class is usually at 9:00.

Same in slovenia, in technical colleges at least.

For some lectures it was great, you really needed those 15 minutes to get coffee, go to the bathroom, etc., but for some late afternoon stuff, you just wanted to shorten the last three breaks to 5 minutes and leave half an hour early.

Same in Denmark. Actually often needed to get from one auditorium across campus to another auditorium

Times are given as "c.t.", cum tempore.

Same thing in Sweden in the 1980s

Still is!

Thankfully

Still is, standard lecture is scheduled for example for 10-12. It starts at 10.15, pause 11.00-11.15, continues until 12.00. So it's neatly split in two 45 minute halves.

This has also been extended to evening events (dinners, balls, parties) in student towns. There “dk” stands for double quarter, so for example 18dk means that an event starts at 18:30, but you may show up from 18:00. And the time between 18:00-18:30 is used for mingling.

It’s a good convention.

so did things end at 11:15am as I imagine a lot of times there was something to be done in the next hour of 11AM?

At the universities I've been to classes were almost always 1½ hours, so until 11:45am.

Generally, a single-slot class was 45 minutes. So a slot at "10 AM" would have started at 10:15 AM and ended at 11:00 AM.

Most lectures were allocated double slots, though, for example from 10 to 12. In that case the actual official lecture time would have been either 10:15 to 11:00, followed by a quarter hour break, and another 45 minutes from 11:15 to 12:00. Alternatively -- and probably more commonly -- there was no break, and the lecture was 1.5 hours from 10:15 to 11:45.

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