How many hours a week was your uni course?

[Dis86]

Mech Eng at Northumbria about 25 hours of lectures & seminars a week basic.
Not including lab work or any extra sessions tutors were willing to offer.

Out of class probably the same again.

Final year was slightly less but with final project to do.

 

[RomanNose]

Why are you asking?

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I think I have about ten hours a week, in terms of contact hours... which sounds ridiculous!

I am just curious, seems like there is a huge difference between courses.
For the people who did 10 hours a week, did you think you had too much free time and would rather have the course compressed?

 

[alx]

I did Chemical Engineering and it was typically 10-15 hours a wekk of lectures. It may not seem like much but usually a lot of complex material was covered in each lecture which (technically) required a fair amount of studying in your own time to truely understand/get your head around.

There was also coursework, weekly problem sheets, etc on top of that.

 

[RomanNose]

A huge difference in headline figures, but it's kinda meaningless. Someone could do twenty hours of private study, whilst another does ten... with the latter actually learning/doing more than the former!

Then, some people have loads of contact hours (sciences, for example) whilst others don't have many (I'm a law student)... but that doesn't mean the chemist does more work than the law student. I only had about ten hours a week of contact time, but I had to do a truly ridiculous amount of work outside of that... whilst my chemistry studying friend had to do less... so, overall, we were probably in a roughly similar position.

But no, I wouldn't want my course compressed! The fact that I have a quarter of the headline hours of a course with forty hours of contact doesn't mean I could do the course in a quarter of the time!

Yeah I imagine that your one of the exceptions where you do much more outside work than contact Though there are probably people on here who did 20 hours in total and 10 hours contact and I wonder what they think.

 

[Hxc]

Nothing like that today!



That was about the same for me on my Geology undergrad. Plus the 9-5+ for a couple of weeks a year when on fieldwork.

Yeahh fieldwork can be pretty brutal, was in Arran at easter working pretty much 8am-10pm every day. Luckily the weather was ace and there was lots of laughs as my coursemates (and future housemates) are ace. Tonsillitis put a bit of a downer on it all, mind.

Tenerife next easter though

One thing to note though, is that I managed to get a mid 2:1 for my first year, without looking at a single one of my lecture notes, just using the material provided online via Blackboard. Made me feel like at least some of the 9am lectures were sleep time wasted

 

[Skillmister]

For the people who did 10 hours a week, did you think you had too much free time and would rather have the course compressed?

It's hard to say with mine. Yes i would have liked some more contact time (maybe just so i feel i got my moneys worth?) but at the same time the standard of teaching was a bit low for anyone who does a reasonable amount of self learning. I found myself knowing large amounts of what was being taught already so i just spent the lecture time doing my own research/practice and just purely using the lecturers for questions.

Plus with it being such time consuming activities (3d modelling, animation etc) it's logical that the vast majority of it will be done outside of contact time and it's not the type of thing you just go over once and know enough to do your assignments.

Towards the end of this semester we had 0-3 hours contact time and i was putting in close to 80 hours a week in my own time.

 

[RomanNose]

Do you mean me specifically, or my course? Everyone on my course has to do loads of work, outside of the contact hours... otherwise they fail/do horribly!

I mean your course. Though it does change in third years when you have projects to do but generally I think most people have more contact hours than they work.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/31_10_06_universities.pdf
This is quite an interesting document, they didn't give an average teaching hours but they gave average study hours which is 12.

 

[RomanNose]

CBA reading a big document - want to highlight specific parts?

Lots of people will have more contact hours than they work outside of that (eg. people with forty hours of contact)... but that's unsurprising!

 

[WAGates]

My undergraduate (Archaeology) hours were 8 for first & second year and 6 for third, on my MA (Museum and Heritage Management) it's been 6 hours a week. Then on top of the directed learning we have roughly 34 hours a week of independent work.