No, the days of the week weren’t relevant to daytime class schedules. My college uses a 6 day cycle. Monday of the first week is Day 1, Tuesday is Day 2, Wednesday is Day 3 and so on. The next week Monday is Day 6 and Tuesday is Day 1 and classes were designated as Even or Odd. So, in effect, classes alternated being MWF and TuTh. I had some experience in PSEO with TuTh longer class scheduling and I preferred the alternating weeks method.
HUH?
HUH?
HUH?
I don’t get it!
I must be stupid or somethin’----'cause I really just don’t understand this system at all.
The whole world works on a 7 day week.
For several billion people, the days of the week are, you know, …well…, the same every week of the year.
That’s what a “week” is, by definition.
Some cultures start their work week on Monday, others on Sunday, etc…but wow…whatever system you choose, simple logic says that it oughta stay the same every week!.
If Monday is Day 1 right now, but turns into Day 2 next week…well, my head ain’t big enough to figgur out whatcha talkin’ ‘bout.
Me, I got myself all ejucated an’ stuff by goin’ to a real university.
Where men were men, and, dammit, Monday was Monday. 
This sort of schedule is common in high schools- it allows students to take e 8 courses with 7 class periods by dropping a different course each day ( Day 1 period 1-7, Day 2 periods 2-8 day periods 3-1 etc ) but I can’t see the advantage of it for college students unless students at a particular college attend 5 days a week during pre-set hours ( say 8-2)
Some of the scheduling systems require a college education to understand them.
We were under the quarter system so my lecture classes were ~60 minutes and held Monday through Thursday. Lab work was afternoon and evenings, with frequent weekend work. Total units needed for a BS from the School of Engineering was between 150 - 170, with a few more for the Honors program.
Stanford University - mid 1980’s.
Supposedly, the story goes, when the university was still just a bunch of monks teaching and instructing way back in the day, they operated on a Monday-Saturday which makes the week and the classes line up nicely. But when the advances of the secular world became too insistent to be ignored and they moved to a standard weekend, no one thought to change the class scheduling system. It comes up as a topic every two years or so and routinely gets voted down as the only people who care are those who have internships or whatever that requires interacting with people on a more usual schedule.
But it’s really not that difficult. Everyone complains about it their first 2 weeks of classes and by the third week they’re absolutely fine. You do lose the days of the week a bit, though.
What I’d heard but cannot vouch for is that retention rates for Tu/Th classes with longer time periods are lower than for MWF classes and this was one way to solve that.
What I remember from a variety of places that I either studied or taught at between the early 1970s and early 1990s, is MWF morning (and maybe up to the 1pm hour) classes were 50 minutes, and TTh morning classes were 75 minutes. But in the afternoon, you’d have MW classes and TTh classes both being 75 minutes, because nobody wanted Friday afternoon classes.
But at King College in Bristol, TN, where I taught for a few years in the 1990s, they had a schedule where practically all the classes met three times a week, 50 minutes each. You’d have something like this:
Period Schedule
1 MWF 8am
2 M 9am, TTh 8am
3 TWF 9am
4 MW 10am,Th 9am
etc.
It took some getting used to, but I liked having standard-length classes. One thing that always bugged me about teaching a 2-day-a-week class is that if you had 4 tests during the semester, you’d lose 6 ‘hours’ of class time, instead of only 4 with a 3-day-a-week class. If you were teaching two sections of a class, one on MWF and one on TTh, you knew you’d cover less ground in the TTh class.
In the late nineties-early 2000’s, the New Jersey Institute of Technology had a very fixed schedule.
First classes were at 8:30. Classes were 85 minutes long. Some labs were double-period. Last “day” class was 4:00 pm
Then night classes generally started at 6:00 and went until 9:00 or 10:00 depending on the class (or the professor…)
ETA: and none of my friends I knew at other colleges ever mentioned a different class schedule. I know Rutgers Newark did a very similar timing since there was some cross-classes. Is this really that common elsewhere? Is it a non-East-Coast thing?
This is very surprising for me. This is more like high school, where you were required to be on campus for X hours a day and you had to fill your class slots with a full schedule. With college, you had some leeway to decide what to take and when - most of the core, required classes had at least a dozen sections to pick from - wanna take History 130 on Friday night from 7-10? Or would you prefer Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 9? How about Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 3? Your choice. Want to make sure your Wednesdays are completely open? You can. You could also pick exactly how many credits to take in a semester, subject to some limitations. As long as you picked a reasonable course load (e.g. less than 15 credits a semester for undergrad), the school was fine with that. So you typically didn’t have the situation where you had to take a junk class in order to “complete your schedule” or have to drop a class because you were just over the limit.
Did NJIT really require you to take a class in each slot, or am I misunderstanding? E.g., “Celidin, you have not registered for anything at 4 PM. You are required to take a full schedule. Might I recommend this basket weaving course?”
Nope. When I went to college in NYC everyone I knew at other colleges had the same sort of schedule with minor variations - and my kids have the same sort of schedule now. Tu- Thurs classes fit that pattern were longer than MWF classes, and although there were minor deviations ( Tu Th Fr or MW ) most courses followed the pattern. This allowed many ,if not most students to get at least a couple of days a week off by fitting all their classes into either Tu-Th or MWF.
The only places I’ve known with what I *think *you are describing are basically trade schools, where everyone at the same point of a particular program takes the exact same classes- for example first semester freshmen in Program A take courses A ,B,C,D and E and second semester students take F,G,H and I with no variation, even if the second semester courses don’t in any way build on the first semester courses.
You got 10 minutes? Lucky. In the late '90s it was seven. As far as I know it still is (I suppose I should know that, given that I teach there now, but they sequester us music folk of on the Loop and we have to schedule around everyone’s class schedules and travel requirements anyway).
Anyway, having to trek from the music department to Crow for physics, then back to the music department then over to the engineering school made for some very hectic days trying to make the journey in time.
I attended universities in Texas and Hawaii. I do believe MWF classes were shorter than T/Th ones. Maybe 50 or 55 minutes for the former, but 80 or 85 for the latter? Or maybe it was 60/90 minutes, and you just had to be sure not to schedule back-to-back classes, especially not across campus. Too much time has elapsed to remember exactly.
There were once-a-week three-hour classes though, those I remember. They could be held on any day of the week.
At the small liberal arts college in Upstate NY I went to, classes were mostly 4 credit hours, held one hour each on Monday Tuesday Wednesday Friday (for lab classes, labs at an additional time, and made the actual class approx 5 hrs a week). Some classes were 4 credit hours and met M-W only for 2hrs, or Tu-th for 2 hours but generally only in the afternoons/evenings for Tu-Th classes. 3 credit hour classes were generally M-W-F for 1hr each or M/W or Tu/th for 90 mins each. But more 4 than 3 credit hour classes. Many people had one or no Thursday classes at all, so Wednesday night was a third party night after Friday and Saturday nights.
My undergraduate uni had, I was told at the time, the largest campus in the country areawise. Whether or not that really was true, it was a long way across. At least one semester I did end up scheduling back-to-back classes on opposite ends. It was like running a marathon getting from one to the other.
You aren’t by any chance a Johnny, are you?
The other thing the odd/even schedule does is make it so that Monday holidays don’t hit the MWF classes disproportionately. I have a cousin who teaches HS music, and she loved it when her district went to odd/even, since music was a once a week thing, and the schools where she went on Mondays missed a lot of music classes.
MIT wasn’t like that in the late 80s or 90s, either. Many classes were an hour, but some were 1.5 hours, plus a recitation section at some different time. Lab classes were typically 3-4 hours, either once or twice a week, again, often with a recitation section. (All of these are actually that time minus ten minutes, as classes always start 10 min after the scheduled hour.) No relationship between the day the class was held and the class length that I could see. Credits were based on the number of hours the class was “supposed” to take, with 45 credits/term being the typical course load (so a class worth 12 credits was often listed as 4-2-6, for expected hours of lecture, recitation, and homework per week). (Transfer credits from normal schools with a 15 unit course load transferred at 3:1.) Usually the number of hours of lecture was 1/3 of the total time allotted for the course, but there were exceptions in both directions.
It’s a bit of a tell, isn’t it.
The more I think about it, the more I think classes were 60 or 90 minutes with 10 minutes between classes. The schedule would be something like class A from 8-9am, class B from 9:10-10:10am, class C from 10:20 etc.
The college I attended was on the system in the OP. The college I currently teach at has MW and TR classes, each on the same schedule - twice a week, an hour fifteen, with ten minutes between classes, so the class times stay the same from day to day. There are also nonstandard classes meeting once a week. I’m told this was done to save on overhead by not having the campus as active on Fridays.
Michigan State in the mid 1970s: nothing like that. All standard classes were 50 minutes with 20 minutes between classes. So the standard daily schedule was 8:00-8:50, 9:10-10:00, etc. If you had a lab, it was typically one day a week with a non-standard schedule, which could be from 1-2 hours long.