Everyone, excepting faculty and a few academic administrators, may be surprised to learn that we have very few (basically, no) general policies on majors and minors (the courses and prerequisite structures) at EMU. The question of standards has been largely left to departments. I believe this is the common procedure across all universities, especially those in the top and middle tier. Curricula grow almost organically out of the historical precedents of the departments from which professors were graduated and the intellectual culture of the discipline.
It’s a good set-up, probably, and has worked reasonably well for, oh, 700 years or so. Still, there are problems.
I serve on one of the CAS committees that reviews course and program proposals from every EMU department and college; we on the committee are constantly running into difficulties due to different expectations and unstated assumptions.
Simple example: in the sciences (including math and cosc), the courses are very sensitive to order. A student needs to complete some courses at the freshman level before going on to sophomore level, and so on, up through senior level. My review committee (comprising scientists) got quite torqued about a COT proposal for an undergraduate major in which there were no prerequisites. In the proposed major, a student could complete all the 400-levels before taking any of the 100-levels. This made no sense to the science-types on the committee — but, apparently, made perfect sense to the faculty in the department proposing the major.
So I’d like to open the floor for a discussion on educational policies. Let’s try to keep it focussed, ok? I’d like everyone to feel welcome to comment, though I’m especially curious about the opinions of those (faculty, students, alumni and interested folks) across the “great divide” in the professional colleges (COE, COB, COT and CHHS), and of those across the “little divide” in the humanities and human-oriented disciplines (CAC-Arts).
Here’s the first topic.
What does one credit hour mean in terms of actual time?
Here are my suggestions:
- For lecture-type classes, 1ch is 1 hour per week in a classroom environment (real or virtual), with an average 3 hours spent studying outside class (for the average student). So, a 3ch class will occupy (on average) 12 hours per week of real time.
- For a lab-type class, 1 ch is 4-5 hours per week in the lab, with 1-2 hours spent outside class. A 1ch lab will occupy 5-7 hours per week.
- For seminar-type classes, 3 ch is 1 hour per week in a classroom environment with extremely high bandwidth (current virtual environments don’t make it, IMO), with 10 hours per week spent outside class. That is, a 3 ch seminar occupies 11 hours per week. So, proportionately, a 1 ch seminar occupies approximately 4 hours per week (but those hours are hard).
- Field-work and clinics — I have no experience in these formats. But certainly, the actual time should be commensurate.
So, a typical student, taking 16 ch (one of which is a lab), should expect to put in 65 hours per week. This is more than a full-time job.
Consequences of my numbers (the policy side):
1. 3 credit hours for one week of elapsed time (e.g., Traverse City classes) is impossible (12 hr/wk * 14 wks = 168 hours). Students will have to do additional work outside of the week on site.
2. 3 credit hours in one week travel class is impossible. Time spent travelling between train station and hotel is not equivalent to time spent doing homework.
3. Classes in which there is no homework must increase hours in the classroom to come up to approximately 12 hours per week.
Makes sense? Unreasonable?
Susan,
This is a huge and vitally important topic you’ve put forth. I applaud you for starting this discussion.
Credit hours were devised to be an approximate measure of what effort was required to have “learned” the subject at hand. I don’t think that holds anymore, and I have little hope that they can be fixed now to do that more effectively in the future.
Part of the problem is that credit hours are ostensibly measures of effort and of learning, but in fact they measure neither. They are just categories we put courses into; what’s the “typical” student? what’s her “typical” work load? No answer to those questions can be meaningful – students are too diverse in their aptitudes, skills, interests, and goals. A math wiz may have huge trouble doing the work of a 400 level history course, but breeze thru a variety of math courses. The physics student may excell in the sciences, but not grasp sociology at all, despite much effort put into the courses.
I side with those critics of higher ed who favor doing away with the credit hour altogether, and replacing it with the most radical of programs: a curriculum centered on pedagogy and learning.
This is however too big a reform for EMU alone. More thoughts on it and related points are in Derek Bok’s great recent book, OUR UNDERACHIEVING COLLEGES: A CANDID LOOK AT HOW MUCH STUDENTS LEARN AND WHY THEY SHOULD BE LEARNING MORE.
In the meantime, I applaud this attempt to get a disucssion across all the “divides” of campus going…and I’ll also add this perspective, from my history perspective: Some people require a lot more time to learn the material than others. So what’s the basis for calculating the “average” amount of hours required to do the work for a class?
Higher ed needs to focus on how students learn as much as we focus on what we want students to learn. Most lectures are filled with information, but many studies show “the average student will be unable to recall most of the factual content of a typical lecture within 15 minutes after the end of class” (Bok, page 48). Credit hours are a left over from the early 20th century, and they are not well suited to being a measure of how students learn. Nor can they do well what they are meant to do – translate multiple disciplines into rough intellectual equivalencies in order to measure progress toward a college degree. Credit hours are the stepping stones toward the degree, but do they really measure much more than courses completed? I’ve had lots of studnets who had plenty of credits but could not explain Darwin’s theory of evolution or the structure of the US government or venture a guess as to what “The sun never sets on the British empire” might possibly mean.
American higher ed does not demand enough of our students, and we don’t provide enough for them to excel as learners.
From a student perspective I take credit hour to indicate how much in class attention I would be getting. IE 3cr = 3 hr’s of a professors time. I suppose I always looked at it as a means for the school to charge me. Of course most professors make themselves available outside of class (thank you!!) so it’s not so much an indicator of the time I’ll be helped but time I’ll be led I suppose. It does help in deciding homework time I need to set aside but I think factored with the level of class. Oddly sometimes this works in reverse. For example a 100 level course is pounding in the basics, which are easy, but repetitive so require more time than a 400 level course which is challenging but doesn’t make you solve the same problem over and over and over…
I think that prereq’s work toward a certain ideal of taking one level before another but it seems that inter department prereq’s don’t work so well. For example if a history class requires a midterm then a writing class of some sort probably should be a prereq. I think this is difficult for the university due to varying levels of freshman. There is also a life experience / maturity factor that plays in and freshman aren’t always 17/18, and not all 17/18 year olds are immature.
It would be nice if there was billable hour or simply a billable rate for classes, and a completely separate indication of how much time the average student can expect to put into lecture/lab/homework.
As far as a degree program goes I think if you move away from a class and credit style it will make transferring more difficult which could be an issue for many students. I don’t see that helping reduce the number of transfer students either because many transfer due to work relocation or financial hardship.
Higbee – I think I understand your point to be about university developing a person not just a field. Many schools produce students that can clearly repeat facts and studies in varied disciplines- but they still don’t truly think about the topics. I think there is a certain amount of basic information every graduate should have, but beyond that it is the ability to quickly seek, qualify and truly digest information that is what I seek from my degree. I suppose I see my professor to have some inside knowledge and they can help me filter out what is truly important from all of the other crap. This may come from one basic difference- I am at EMU to learn. I do want a degree but I want the knowledge more. Many students are told to go to college after they graduate HS and they are there simply because they are doing what they think they are supposed to do. Just like when they get married and have 2.5 children…