Hello everyone,

At Plymouth State University, we require all new students to go through an orientation session which includes something that we call The First Class.  This is an opportunity for all new students to meet with a PSU faculty member in their first class at PSU.  We have a number of goals in the first class but one of the main ones is to describe the differences between high school classes and college classes.  In the next few postings, I will examine some of these differences but I wanted to start with the one that I think makes or breaks new college students: the difference in work load expectations between college and high school.
One of the things that people who aren’t part of the college experience seem surprised at is how few hours students spend in the classroom.  A full-time load for students at PSU is between 12 and 17 credits.  Typically, a credit equals 50 minutes per week of seat time, that is, time spent in a seat in the classroom.  This means that the average full-time student will spend between 12X50=600 and 17X50=850 minutes per week actually in class.  That is, the average full-time student is in class between 10 and a little over 14 hours per week.  When faced with these numbers, which seem far lower than the numbers of hours they were in class in high school, many students believe they will be able to take on full-time jobs and all kinds of other activities in addition to being full-time students.  But there is a major difference in expectations as students move from high school to college.

When I plan a course, I recognize that only a small portion of the class involves learning while sitting in the classroom.  I expect that for every hour a student spends in my classroom, she will spend 2 or 3 additional hours doing the work of the class.  This means that I expect a student who is taking 12 credits of course work to spend 20 to 30 hours outside of class working on classes.  When you add this to the 10 hours that the student spends actually in class, we’re talking about 30-40 hours per week, approximately equivalent to a full-time job.  Most students take more than 12 credits per semester.  If you look at the maximum full-time course load, 17 credits, I would expect a student to spend 28-42 hours outside of class working on the course work.  When you add that to the 14 hours spent actually in class, we’re talking about 42-56 hours per week.  In other words, I would expect that a full-time student will spend between 30 and 56 hours on their class work.  Clearly, this is a significant expenditure of time. 

What kind of work do I expect students to engage in during these significant hours of work?  First, I always assign reading.  It surprises me when I discover that some students have not bothered to purchase the required texts for a course.  I do not lecture about material that I expect students to have read.  I will answer any questions students have about the reading but I think it is a waste of class time to repeat what students should have read, unless those students have questions about that reading.  I also will be looking ahead and working on bigger assignments over the course of the semester.  That is, if there is a major paper in one of my courses, I expect that students will divide the work required to complete this major paper over the course of the several weeks prior to the paper due date.  I may help students divide this work into manageable chunks, so that there are smaller assignments due during those intermediate weeks but the main point is that I do not expect that students will cram to complete major papers and other large assignments in the few days before their due dates.  Finally, I expect that students will be preparing for exams and quizzes regularly so that they will not “cram” in the few days before the exam or quiz. These are all examples of self-education.  And this is one of the major differences between high school and college.  Faculty members expect students to be at least partially self-motivated, that they will read and plan their semesters at least partially on their own.  This is one of the major skills required of the successful college student—the ability to plan the work of a semester.

So if you are planning to go to college or are already a college student, you should think of your full-time course load as a full-time job, even though you are not spending huge amounts of time in class.  Figuring out how to work outside of the classroom to learn new material and to complete assigned tasks is one of the most important skills of the successful college student. 

What do you think of my expectations?
Cathie