Is there a universally accepted method for figuring out how many credit hours are equal to a number of actual classroom (lecture) hours? What about lab hours?
Googling “credit hours lecture time” and other similar phrases only gives links to schools offering classes at all different credit hour values for a semester. Some school semesters are 10 or 12 weeks while others are 15 or 16 and some classes are 90 minutes long while others are less than an hour (50 minutes). Nobody seems to be using the same formula.
The program I’m trying to convert into credit hours was 2 years long, split into 4 semesters of 12 weeks each (there were two 2-week breaks in summer & winter). Each day was 8:30-3:30 with an hour for lunch, in other words 6 hours of class time per day. That’s 360 real life hours per semester, and 2,880 for the whole 2-year program.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think there is a mathematical calculation that can give credit hours. The number of credit hours for a class is determined by the college/university offering the class. You can’t just arbitrarily say “I sat in a classroom for X hours, therefore I earned Y credit hours.”
You need to check with the institution that offered the course, and if possible get a copy of your transcript. That will tell you the number of credit hours.
On the other hand, if this was not an officially accredited program then you earned zero credit hours.
I agree with FatBaldGuy that you need to get your transcript to figure out the credit hours you earned. Your program sounds very, very different from my university, where a credit hour was precisely equal to how many hours you’d spent in class each week, that semester. An average load was 15 or 16 hours–so you see it didn’t involve nearly as much classroom time as you had. Yet this was an accredited, respected institution.
My school seems to do it by roughly rounding off how many hours you spend a week in each class, i.e.:
Calculus class is ~1.5 hours long x 3 days a week = 4.5. It’s a 5 credit hour class.
Speech class is 1.25 hours long x 2 days a week = 2.5. It’s a 3 credit hour class.
So at least here it seems to be, roughly averaging and rounding, how many hours you spend a week in the class, though one of my classes still meets 2.5 hours a week but they decided to split it into two classes and they dropped its credit hours to 2.
I agree with the others. Colleges and universities make up their own rules for these things but they tend to balance them out with their own graduation requirements for the number of “hours” earned for their own classes. My university counted most traditional classes as 4 credits with 1 credit given for the lab even though the classroom time was about the same. Our freshman writing class awarded 6 credits because they thought it was an extra burdon. I believe the most generic standard is 3 credit hours per regular class.
I’m not sure that I’d agree with the statement that “colleges and universities make up their own rule for these things”–I mean, it’s sort of true, but most colleges and universities are accredited, which means that someone is looking over their shoulder saying “6 credits for freshman writing? How many pages is that, and how many papers? School X only gives 3 credits for freshman writing, and they assign Y pages in Z papers over Q weeks!”
(And colleges and universities frequently share information back and forth with each other directly as well. So it’s not like the numbers are made up arbitrarily. On the other hand, it does depend. So I’m not sure that there is a formula which would be as useful to you as a copy of the transcript would be–especially if you are thinking about getting your existing credits turned into credits that count towards a degree at another school now.)
There are accrediting standards. Generally, the credit hours are the number of class hours a week, assuming a 15-week term. Shorter terms add more hours of class a week. The college itself can tell you how many credit hours you have earned.
If you can give a few more the details of the program, we might be able to make a better guess. For example, was each semester’s 360-hour marathon all the same subject, or did you break it down and do two weeks of (oh say) calculus and then two weeks of (also say) linear algebra? What was the subject matter of the program? Would you say that it was graduate-level work, or undergraduate-level? How much homework was there? Most undergraduate classes I took assumed at least a 2:1 homework-to-classwork ratio, and some graduate classes assume 3:1. Last but not least, are you getting a certification of any kind for completing this work?
Answers to your first 2 questions are no and no, as others have already replied. Also what you have called “semesters” are more commonly referred to as “quarters”, and that opens up another can of worms – quarterly vs. semester credits. If you want answers that will help you get credit at some university, then your best recourse is to provide transcripts to the university and let them decide. If you’re interested in converting classroom hours to equivalent credits for some other purpose, such as a job application, then I’d go with 1 credit = approx. 1 hour in a classroom or lab per week. In academia, 1 hour could be anywhere from 50 mins to over an hour. And I’d bury the distinction between quarters and semesters because that just confuses things some more. Since these are more opinions than straight answers, your question should more rightly belong in the IMHO board than the GQ board.
It’s for a job application, so I think a ballpark figure would probably be OK. I did call the school (which is fully accredited) and ask for the information but it has been two weeks and counting so I may end up going with a best guess.
I remember the program was sold as the equivalent of an EE study earned at a 4 year university, but minus the liberal arts requirements (that’s how they could cram it all into two years). Each 12 week semester was geared towards different aspects of electonics theory. This was 20 years ago but from memory it went something like this:
Semester 1 - Basic Electricity, units, ohm’s law, etc.
2 - Simple circuitry - network & bridge theory, resonance, filters, etc.
3 - Semiconductor physics, power supply theory & design, linear amplifiers, analog signal processing & shaping
4 - Video signals and processing circuits
5 & 6 - Communications topics (signal processing, modulation types, antenna theory), FCC regulations, etc.
7 -
8 - Digital applications (number systems, gates, flip-flops, registers, TTL circuit designs, etc.)
I don’t remember what semester 7 covered. During semesters 3, 5 and 8 we had to build a project from scratch (no HeathKits). So for example, in semester 3 I built a regulated power supply, semester 5 a basic AM/FM receiver and in semester 8 a gated frequency counter. And I had to give an oral presentation on the design of whatever I built.
The class time was usually 3 hours of theory, an hour of math and two hours of lab. These semesters were intense. For example, during semiconductor theory we started at the atomic level and learned all about covalent bonding and doping. It wasn’t just the simplified black-box approach used in many tech schools where they explain a diode in terms of a unidirectional switch, without explaining why it behaves that way.
It also depends on what system the school used. As an undergraduate, my university didn’t use credit hours, but course units, with virtually every ordinary course being 1 CU. The exceptions I recall were that lecture/lab courses were usually 1.5 CU (or the lecture was considered 1 CU and the lab .5 CU).
At law school, we used credit hours, and I believe the ABA regulations provided something like each credit hour having to be at least 50 minutes of class time per week for a 15 week term, or the equivalent. I think this is the usual way that credit hours are computed, but some types of courses (clinical internships and the like) might have lower credit hour values compared to the actual time spent.
Besides accrediting agencies, states sometimes get into the act. New York State, for example, specifies that, for each credit a school awards, there have to be at least 750 minutes of instruction, which is 15 50-minute long sessions. So, a typical 3-credit course meeting for a typical 15 week semester would have to meet for 3 50-minute sessions each week.
I happen to know this because I’ve had to figure out how to shoehorn courses into rather atypical meeting schedules.
When I Googled “credit hours” “contact hours” most of the sites that came up were from specific educational institutions. Here and here are a couple of institution-specific examples of what look like answers to the OP’s question.
It varies all over the place, but the old standard was that:
One “credit” is one “hour” of class per week.
One “hour” is a little less than a real hour, to leave time for moving from class to class.
Personally, I use a microcentury instead of an hour, but that’s just me. Anyhow, this means that a class meeting three days a week for an “hour” each time is a standard 3-credit course. One meeting twice a week for an “hour” and a half each time is also 3 credits. A class meeting in lecture for three “hours” and with an “hour” of a smaller discussion section run by a grad student is 4 credits.
We use what is called the “Carnegie Unit” in our curriculum (It is supposed to be the standard in CA).
1 hour per week of lecture = 1 unit of credit = 3 hours of “work”
3 hours per week of laboratory = 1 unit of credit = 3 hours of “work”
According to the official definition of the unit we were given, each credit unit is supposed to require 3 hours of work per week. So if you are in a lecture for 3 hours per week, the class is worth 3 units: this means you are expected to spend 6 hours per week on classwork on your own, whether this is homework, reading, studying, recopying notes, etc… Since labs are mostly done in the scheduled time, they are worth 1 unit for 3 hours spent in class.
So if you are taking 12 units, you are supposed to be spending 36 hours per week (in and out of class) on classwork. This is why it’s considered to be full-time…
My favorites :rolleyes: are the 1-credit lab classes that require you to spend several hours/week (8-10 is not unusual) in lab working your projects.
I’ve also had 3 credit English Lit classes that only met twice a week, but required probably 20 hours/week outside of class reading the tons of assigned material.
As I understand it, there are no universal rules for converting acutal classroom hours into credit hours. There are, however, organizations such as AACRAO (the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers) that have established guidelines which are widely accepted. This is especially useful for those who have attended secondary schooling or college outside of the U.S. are are applying to an American university.
