Academic Credit

The amount of credit assigned to a course reflects the amount of time you will have to dedicate to that class.  In general, one credit hour means you will spend one hour per week in lecture, or three hours per week in a lab.  To be completely accurate, it's only 50 minutes of lecture or 2-1/2 hours of lab, but for simplicity's sake, everybody rounds it up to an even hour.

A typical lecture course carries three hours of credit.  For this class, you will sit in lecture three hours each week.  There are three common ways of dividing this time:

• three 1 hour lectures, at the same time each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
• two 1-1/2 hour lectures, at the same time each Tuesday and Thursday
• a single 3 hour lecture, usually at night or on Saturday

There are exceptions, of course, but these are the most common.  Most EE courses are four credit classes.  They have an associated laboratory.  You get three hours of credit for the lecture and one hour for the lab. This is denoted in the undergraduate catalog as (3 + 3P).  The "P" stands for "practicum", or lab.  Labs meet once a week for three hours, in addition to the lecture.  Lab sections are scheduled throughout the day: mornings, afternoons, evenings, and even weekends.  There are lots of labs.

However, the time you spend in class is only part of the story. There's that thing called homework. As rule, you should expect to spend 2-3 times the credit hours on homework. Thus, a typical four credit class would require 8-12 hours per week for homework. Add in the time spent in lecture & lab, and you're up to 14-18 hours a week, all on one class!  A full time student carries 12-18 credits of coursework. By the time you add it all up, you can expect to dedicate 42-54 hours each week to school. It's a full-time job.