[mr_gibbins]

Nope, nope and nope again. I refute this utterly, as a teaching academic.

Contact hours at most universities are around 2-4 hours per week per 15-credit module. To gain a degree, you have to take 120 credits a year, typically two terms of 4 x 15 credit modules, or 8-16 hours of contact per week maximum with the entire summer off.

You therefore have at least 24 hours a week to study on your own to bring your working week up to 40 hours. Maybe you're working, fair enough. But if you don't have time to study subjects in depth then you need to reduce your working hours. If you can't, then by definition you are not a full-time student.

This is not a personal attack on you. Perhaps you were genuinely studious and spent all your time poring over the coursework. It is a commentary on the whole academic sector where we repeatedly see students do nothing for most of the time and spend the last 2 weeks cramming and putting in substandard assessments, then blame the course material/their lecturers/their anxiety etc. for their poor results. And of course the leadership teams lap it up and tell us to make our courses easier.

[boringg]

No personal attack taken but your experience and points fail to win me over.

The difference probably belies in the rigor of the program. It sounds like you are working in a non-engineering based program. In our engineering programs we had 40 hours of class time + lab time per week.

I had a concurrent arts degree at the same time which is was, in comparison, incredibly light workload - though concurrently it took time away.

The only time that I will say was much lighter was in the final year of undergrad - the course load finally lightened up.

N.B. this whole conversation clearly excludes summer.

[nmeagent]

> The difference probably belies in the rigor of the program.

This is anecdata of course, but my experience with a top-3 US undergrad aerospace engineering program in the late-90s, early 2000s was around 15-16 hours of class time per week, sometimes increasing to 18-19 or so with labs. Work outside of class was 3x this or maybe 4x around midterms or finals.

[bo1024]

You posted this elsewhere in the thread, where I replied that this is not normal in the U.S. Can I ask what university and degree program it is where students have 40 hours of class and lab time per week?

[wheelinsupial]

They mentioned engineering programs in their comment.

40 hours isn't normal even for engineering programs. Every engineering program I've looked at has higher course hour and credits required. Obviously I haven't looked at every single engineering program at every engineering school, so there probably exists some counter example showing it's no different than arts or science..

Where I studied, we had one semester with 40.5 hours of lecture, lab, and tutorials. One other semester was around 38 or 39 hours. The rest were in the mid-twenties for lecture, lab, tutorial. My program wasn't the typical engineering program, but all of the other engineering schools where I went (Western Canada) did require more credits and more class hours than science and arts and business programs. There may have been some exceptions with honors programs (meaning they have to take 132 credits vs 120 credits and write a thesis) in arts and science that put them closer to engineering programs, but these have limited enrollment.

[stonemetal12]

Where do you teach? Where I have gone, 1 credit meant 1 hr of lecture and an expected 2 hr of study outside of lecture. Therefore 15 credits means 45 hours a week of study before you get curious about your field.

For example here is Purdue's handbook on credit guidelines:

https://www.purdue.edu/registrar/forms/Semester_Credit_Hours...