Emma Kolakowski is a senior majoring in professional and public writing. She is also a member of the MSU Professional and Public Writing Club (co-president — professional development), the MSU Fencing Club, and the Alliance of Queer and Ally Students.
Universities across the nation, including MSU, rely on a somewhat nebulous definition of credit hours, resulting in possible misconceptions of how many hours of work will accompany a class. This lack of clear expectation of what, say, a 15-credit hour semester actually entails, has the potential to create problems for both students and professors. Students, especially first-years and/or freshmen, allocate their schedules without understanding that two different three-credit-hour classes might have totally different demands. This potential for an imbalanced schedule can cause unnecessary stress on the student and negatively affect their school-life balance. Instructors run the risk of under- or over-assigning work, and can end up receiving subpar assignments. Since both instructors and students can suffer adverse effects from unclear workload designations, many at MSU are trying to clarify the relationship between credit hours and workload.
I spoke to James Lucas in MSU's Office of the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education about the occasional disparity between a class's advertised credit hours and its actual workload. Lucas says that the credit hour guidelines most universities use come from the Carnegie definition established in the early 1900s, but there's little formal definition of a credit. Credits are defined by the amount of time spent in a class, but as Lucas says, "We also at MSU allow a difference between contact time in a lecture class versus contact time in a more experiential or lab setting. So when you look at lab courses, you might have a lab course that meets for three hours [a week] but it's only one credit."
Eddie Boucher, an ISS professor and last year's recipient of the College of Social Science's Teaching Innovator Award, provided further insight into the determination of credit hours. Boucher says the rough formula in higher education is that for every credit hour, there should be an expected one hour of instruction and 2 or 3 hours of homework and study time outside of the class meeting. So in an ISS class, all of which are four credits, students spend a minimum of 12 hours a week on that class. Of course it varies, Boucher says, from week to week.
"Ideally, professors won't backload a class. We don't want instructors to backload stuff, because all of a sudden...[a] paper's due a week before the final, and the final's 50% of the grade... that's insane," says Boucher. If a student is taking a 4-credit class, then, they can expect to spend four hours per week on class meetings alone. A standard 15-credit-semester — what MSU encourages its students to take — comes out to far more than 15 hours a week, with the addition of time for homework and review.
Lucas says students should actually be spending even more time on their academics, saying that studies show that students spend less time studying now than they once did. He says students only spend 10 to 15 hours a week studying in total, when the number should be closer to 30 or 45 hours. Combine Lucas's studying guidelines and Boucher's calculations of instruction time, and the average 15-credit student is expected to spend 45 to 60 hours a week on their academics, not to mention their extracurriculars, their social lives, and their part-time jobs.
These numbers may sound like mere supposition, but this jam-packed schedule is all too real for many MSU students, as a recent student survey proves. One surveyed student said: “...[class] is only a 3 credit class but the workload is EXTREME. It is like taking a 6 credit class.” The student expressed regret at their class selection and anxiety about being able to graduate.
Christine Raisanen, director of advising at the Honors College, said she feels that workload concerns such as this one come more from STEM students, but these tales of despair are not unique to STEM majors — in every department, there are students who end up with far more on their plate than the credit hours led them to expect.
Casey Miles, an advisor within the College of Arts and Letters, said, “This [students having workload concerns] is actually a pretty common problem. I have had this conversation with many students throughout the semester...This has especially been true in the pandemic when burnout is happening more often and sooner in the semester.” Raisanen echoed this sentiment, saying that especially for first-year students, the online nature exacerbated concerns.
Miles says that as an advisor, her first recommendation is that students reach out to their instructor. “We cannot assume that coursework is the center of students' lives. In fact, most students have jobs, internships, are parents and/or caretakers, all while balancing mental health and a social life.”
With students already so occupied, it's crucial that instructors make sure that they are assigning an amount of work that falls within the appropriate parameters for the assigned credit hours of their courses. This is important to maintaining student health, making sure students are getting a robust rather than rushed education, and last but not least, ensuring that students with exceptional life circumstances are not further disadvantaged.
A current MSU senior who wished to remain anonymous shared how she originally was interested in the computer science program at MSU. However, she admitted to having been "weeded out" by so-called "weeder courses," those that are made intentionally difficult in order to force entrants into a particular major program to "prove themselves." The student in question was in uncertain financial straits and was working two jobs in order to stay afloat; and the inordinate number of hours that she would have needed to dedicate to this allegedly four-credit class was logistically impossible. This student, who has long since switched her major, told me that she was embarrassed to have been weeded, feeling as though it reflected poorly on her as a student. She liked computer science, but there was no way she could commit to two jobs and 48 hours a week of academics, especially when all of her multiple weeder classes were demanding far more work than their credit hours suggested.
Assigning a workload in excess of a course's credit hours is not only harmful to all of the course's students, but is detrimental to the point of exclusion of students who have a unique social standing, such as a lower socio-economic status. As MSU continues to pursue its mission of supporting and advancing diversity, instructors must consider that an excessive workload burden will fall more heavily on some of their students than others.
So how can instructors create a course load that both adheres to credit-workload guidelines and still prioritize optimal learning for students? From Boucher's perspective, a partial solution is having students contribute to the formation of the curriculum. "I think those are novel approaches, I think that can get derailed sometimes too...but if it's done with maturity, and professors really trust their students — here's what I've always found when I've done these types of things. Students are harder on themselves when they're designing it."
Lucas reflects that the different backgrounds of students also ought to be considered. No two students are the same, and what might be a manageable workload for one may be overwhelming to a student from a less robust school district. Lucas points out that "what might be really onerous for one student might not be really onerous for another student." So what's the solution? Some students need to be taught how to learn, Lucas suggested. "We have to help them learn to do [higher-level academic skills] in college...We can try to provide that basis for students." Lucas suggested an educational practice he's familiar with called "scaffolding theory," a practice of helping students progress in a "developmentally appropriate way," a way that is appropriate both for their individual situation and for the course. This is especially relevant in lower-level courses and those with a high population of freshmen in the class.
However, it's true that faculty do have an obligation to cover a certain amount of material in their course and prepare students for the next one, a fact that both Boucher and Lucas acknowledged. "To change my course, how much I assign, how much I try to cover, needs to be a conversation beyond me, about my course. It needs to be a conversation with the whole department," Lucas says. There's a difference between students who are overworked and students who are simply not working hard enough. But this distinction is even less clear than the workload-to-credits formula.
Miles said that from her perspective as an advisor, the decision about how to handle an overwhelming workload comes down to the student. They must consider “the pros and cons of contacting the professor, staying in the class and getting a passing grade, or dropping the class altogether.” The instructor’s response to their student’s concerns often affects this decision. Will they offer extensions? Will they work with the student to find potential solutions? Or will they, as one student lamented, “assume that [the student is] just making excuses?” Many students push themselves, even while knowing the dangers of a heavy semester. Miles asks, “Do [students] know when they're doing too much? That's often a hard line to find because of the pressure students feel from the university, their professors, parents, and communities”.
The only solution is to keep advancing the interests of the students wherever possible — whether that means clearer consensus between instructors and administration; the collaborative creation of credit-workload standards between colleges, programs, and majors; or simply trusting students to be honest to their instructors about their capacity to perform.
Universities across the nation, including MSU, rely on a somewhat nebulous definition of credit hours, resulting in possible misconceptions of how many hours of work will accompany a class. This lack of clear expectation of what, say, a 15-credit hour semester actually entails, has the potential to create problems for both students and professors. Students, especially first-years and/or freshmen, allocate their schedules without understanding that two different three-credit-hour classes might have totally different demands. This potential for an imbalanced schedule can cause unnecessary stress on the student and negatively affect their school-life balance. Instructors run the risk of under- or over-assigning work, and can end up receiving subpar assignments. Since both instructors and students can suffer adverse effects from unclear workload designations, many at MSU are trying to clarify the relationship between credit hours and workload.
I spoke to James Lucas in MSU's Office of the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education about the occasional disparity between a class's advertised credit hours and its actual workload. Lucas says that the credit hour guidelines most universities use come from the Carnegie definition established in the early 1900s, but there's little formal definition of a credit. Credits are defined by the amount of time spent in a class, but as Lucas says, "We also at MSU allow a difference between contact time in a lecture class versus contact time in a more experiential or lab setting. So when you look at lab courses, you might have a lab course that meets for three hours [a week] but it's only one credit."
Eddie Boucher, an ISS professor and last year's recipient of the College of Social Science's Teaching Innovator Award, provided further insight into the determination of credit hours. Boucher says the rough formula in higher education is that for every credit hour, there should be an expected one hour of instruction and 2 or 3 hours of homework and study time outside of the class meeting. So in an ISS class, all of which are four credits, students spend a minimum of 12 hours a week on that class. Of course it varies, Boucher says, from week to week.
"Ideally, professors won't backload a class. We don't want instructors to backload stuff, because all of a sudden...[a] paper's due a week before the final, and the final's 50% of the grade... that's insane," says Boucher. If a student is taking a 4-credit class, then, they can expect to spend four hours per week on class meetings alone. A standard 15-credit-semester — what MSU encourages its students to take — comes out to far more than 15 hours a week, with the addition of time for homework and review.
Lucas says students should actually be spending even more time on their academics, saying that studies show that students spend less time studying now than they once did. He says students only spend 10 to 15 hours a week studying in total, when the number should be closer to 30 or 45 hours. Combine Lucas's studying guidelines and Boucher's calculations of instruction time, and the average 15-credit student is expected to spend 45 to 60 hours a week on their academics, not to mention their extracurriculars, their social lives, and their part-time jobs.
These numbers may sound like mere supposition, but this jam-packed schedule is all too real for many MSU students, as a recent student survey proves. One surveyed student said: “...[class] is only a 3 credit class but the workload is EXTREME. It is like taking a 6 credit class.” The student expressed regret at their class selection and anxiety about being able to graduate.
Christine Raisanen, director of advising at the Honors College, said she feels that workload concerns such as this one come more from STEM students, but these tales of despair are not unique to STEM majors — in every department, there are students who end up with far more on their plate than the credit hours led them to expect.
Casey Miles, an advisor within the College of Arts and Letters, said, “This [students having workload concerns] is actually a pretty common problem. I have had this conversation with many students throughout the semester...This has especially been true in the pandemic when burnout is happening more often and sooner in the semester.” Raisanen echoed this sentiment, saying that especially for first-year students, the online nature exacerbated concerns.
Miles says that as an advisor, her first recommendation is that students reach out to their instructor. “We cannot assume that coursework is the center of students' lives. In fact, most students have jobs, internships, are parents and/or caretakers, all while balancing mental health and a social life.”
With students already so occupied, it's crucial that instructors make sure that they are assigning an amount of work that falls within the appropriate parameters for the assigned credit hours of their courses. This is important to maintaining student health, making sure students are getting a robust rather than rushed education, and last but not least, ensuring that students with exceptional life circumstances are not further disadvantaged.
A current MSU senior who wished to remain anonymous shared how she originally was interested in the computer science program at MSU. However, she admitted to having been "weeded out" by so-called "weeder courses," those that are made intentionally difficult in order to force entrants into a particular major program to "prove themselves." The student in question was in uncertain financial straits and was working two jobs in order to stay afloat; and the inordinate number of hours that she would have needed to dedicate to this allegedly four-credit class was logistically impossible. This student, who has long since switched her major, told me that she was embarrassed to have been weeded, feeling as though it reflected poorly on her as a student. She liked computer science, but there was no way she could commit to two jobs and 48 hours a week of academics, especially when all of her multiple weeder classes were demanding far more work than their credit hours suggested.
Assigning a workload in excess of a course's credit hours is not only harmful to all of the course's students, but is detrimental to the point of exclusion of students who have a unique social standing, such as a lower socio-economic status. As MSU continues to pursue its mission of supporting and advancing diversity, instructors must consider that an excessive workload burden will fall more heavily on some of their students than others.
So how can instructors create a course load that both adheres to credit-workload guidelines and still prioritize optimal learning for students? From Boucher's perspective, a partial solution is having students contribute to the formation of the curriculum. "I think those are novel approaches, I think that can get derailed sometimes too...but if it's done with maturity, and professors really trust their students — here's what I've always found when I've done these types of things. Students are harder on themselves when they're designing it."
Lucas reflects that the different backgrounds of students also ought to be considered. No two students are the same, and what might be a manageable workload for one may be overwhelming to a student from a less robust school district. Lucas points out that "what might be really onerous for one student might not be really onerous for another student." So what's the solution? Some students need to be taught how to learn, Lucas suggested. "We have to help them learn to do [higher-level academic skills] in college...We can try to provide that basis for students." Lucas suggested an educational practice he's familiar with called "scaffolding theory," a practice of helping students progress in a "developmentally appropriate way," a way that is appropriate both for their individual situation and for the course. This is especially relevant in lower-level courses and those with a high population of freshmen in the class.
However, it's true that faculty do have an obligation to cover a certain amount of material in their course and prepare students for the next one, a fact that both Boucher and Lucas acknowledged. "To change my course, how much I assign, how much I try to cover, needs to be a conversation beyond me, about my course. It needs to be a conversation with the whole department," Lucas says. There's a difference between students who are overworked and students who are simply not working hard enough. But this distinction is even less clear than the workload-to-credits formula.
Miles said that from her perspective as an advisor, the decision about how to handle an overwhelming workload comes down to the student. They must consider “the pros and cons of contacting the professor, staying in the class and getting a passing grade, or dropping the class altogether.” The instructor’s response to their student’s concerns often affects this decision. Will they offer extensions? Will they work with the student to find potential solutions? Or will they, as one student lamented, “assume that [the student is] just making excuses?” Many students push themselves, even while knowing the dangers of a heavy semester. Miles asks, “Do [students] know when they're doing too much? That's often a hard line to find because of the pressure students feel from the university, their professors, parents, and communities”.
The only solution is to keep advancing the interests of the students wherever possible — whether that means clearer consensus between instructors and administration; the collaborative creation of credit-workload standards between colleges, programs, and majors; or simply trusting students to be honest to their instructors about their capacity to perform.
