And Here I Am

[knitress]

A small look inside my head this morning:

It's not quite noon and I'm doing ok for someone who slept until nearly 9am.  I've had breakfast AND lunch (food is important, after all), I'm dressed (what, yoga pants and a Dr Who tee doesn't count as dressed?) and I have this week's recipe in the crock pot (I'm trying to cook once a week.  This time it's

Comments

[anirt]

From my experience, it does sound like there was a difference. At Lawrence, you were perfectly fine taking 3 courses each term and graduating in 4 years. We did not really have anyone do less than full-time -- I'm not even sure if there was a published tuition schedule if you did less than full-time. OTOH, there were no additional fees if you overloaded, either.

You needed 36 credits to graduate = 9 credits/yr, 3 per term.
The course hours would be like this:
MWF = 3 x 70 min classes x 10 weeks
T-Th = 2 x 2hr classes x 10 weeks
You could do three lab classes (never recommended, although I often had two), each with a 3-4 hr lab each week, which would be 3 credits. Or you could do 3 non-lab classes, which would be 3 credits.

The music classes were sometimes partial credits: 1/3 credit band + 1/6 credit music lessons = 3.5 credits in a term, the max most advisors were comfortable with.

So if I did the math right, you could have 3 MWF, no labs, which would be 10.5 hrs/week for 3 credits.
Or you might do 2 T-TH, 1 MWF, two 4-hr labs, which would be 19.5 hrs/week for 3 credits.

Oohhhh. So that's why they ditched 1 course = 1 credit after I left. But a class with lab is still the same number of units as a humanities class, so it's still sort of imbalanced for science students? Maybe?

Taking 4 credits in a term was strongly discouraged and considered overloading and always required advisor signature. Anyone who did that was generally going to be a stress puppy. Against advice, I overloaded my very last trimester. Even though one of the credits was independent study (or perhaps because), I nearly failed one of the classes (Literatur der Wende).

[knitress]

There's the difference. At Stanford the classes were shorter; a MWF definitely was NOT 70 minutes each session. So Lawrence is covering more material in each quarter, but students take fewer classes each quarter. Over four years it evens out.

Stanford was like Northwestern, which is why I was assume that's what anyplace on quarters "has" to use this system. Oddly enough, after being a student on quarters I only taught on semesters!