I saw Spot click

[brin_bellway]

(previously on)

Submitted my final assignment of the semester today, about eight weeks after I started.

Three more courses/semesters to go. Next stop: macroeconomics.

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Congrats! Good luck!

(That seems to be a very quick "semester" - are you much faster than the average student or is there a disconnect between the implied "You do two of these per year" attribute of a semester and your school.

[brin_bellway]

Sort of both? Sort of neither?

I was fast on *this particular course* because it assumed I was starting off with very little tech-competence, and in particular zero experience with Microsoft Office (and/or its open-source alternatives). Also there were no exams on this one (never had that happen before, though some courses have only had one exam), so I didn't have to devote any time to pre-exam revision. In general I am slow, taking 4.5 - 6 months to complete [two courses when I didn't have a job, one course now that I'm usually working ~10 - 20 hours/week].

(And part of the reason I dropped to one course is because I figured that if I *did* find enough time for more than one course per [4.5 - 6 month period] while working, I could always just complete one-course-at-a-time faster. Which is exactly what I did in this case.)

Since my university is mostly aimed at people who already have a lot on their plate (many people work *full-time* and still find the time and energy to study! maybe I'll work my way up to having that kind of capacity someday, but I do *not* think I am there right now), you get six months to complete a course by default, up to twelve if you pay extra. You are officially a student as long as you take at least one course per year; reading between the lines of some of the student statistics I've seen, it looks like the average courseload per student is about three courses/year, so my current courseload of ~two courses/year is actually not far off.

(I knew Normal Students were expected to get everything done in four months, but I was shocked to learn that they're expected to do this for *five courses at once*. God, no wonder people talk like "a magic tower that cuts four years off your lifespan" is a reasonable metaphor for university. Although apparently the expected hours/course/week varies: my school says to expect 10 - 15 hours/course/week, and Mom said hers was like 6 - 10.)

((Also, FWIW, Mom took 11 years to complete her bachelor's, in large part for financial reasons (she spent a lot of time coasting on her one-free-course-per-semester job benefit). So while I am aware of the Normal Students suffering over--*waves vaguely*--there somewhere, my own environment has been pretty supportive of the tortoise method.))

---

(Sometimes I worry what my current and historical workloads say about my capacity to work full-time even *without* night school, but OTOH I feel like a lot of my productivity problems are caused by task-switching: after a lunch shift, by the time you've gotten home and processed the afternoon's events and changed out of uniform and eaten something, there's not *that* much time left before dinner prep (and even on days I'm not *participating* in dinner prep Mom tends to make a lot of noise), so it's hard to get stuck in. And if your dinner shift starts at 4, you have to stop studying at 3 so you can go have an early dinner and get ready to leave. A single 40 hours/week load might well be easier to bear than two 15 hours/week loads, especially with the motivating force of a paycheque behind all of it.)

[contrarianarchon]

Hmm. My university "expects" you to spend ~30-40 hours a week studying for a fulltime load of 4 courses per 12-18 week semester (two semesters per year) depending on how you count it (12 weeks of real teaching, 2 weeks of breaks in the middle of that, 2 weeks of designated desperate catchup time, 2-4 weeks of exams) but in practice most courses have 2-6 hours a week of actual teaching and practicals and so forth during actual teaching and the rest is dependent on e.g. how quickly you can do exercises and how much study you need to do to pass tests. I'm probably on the lower side of how much you can do and still be a solid student but I don't have a solid inventory of time spent since I don't block out regular study time (my study tends to be more a putting-out-fires approach where I have a list of upcoming deadlines and piling up topics to study and I try and keep the number of fires as small as possible).

I usually have exams for about 80% of my subjects, but probably no more than 40% of my total grades come from exam scores. The general impression I have is that "softer" subjects in inside a department tend to not have exams; for me that's "ethics for engineers" and for you that's "How to use Excel"?

You can also fit in an extra course over summer if there's one you need on offer, and theoretically you can over the winter break as well but in practise that time clashes with exams so unless your exams are all super early in the exam period it's a deathwish. I don't do either, which makes uni only really take up like 2/3rds of my year.

(All of this is somewhat factually untrue for this specific year since I'm only getting 3/4 credit for my study in norway thanks to shenanigans; also the norwegian university does things slightly differently)

~~~

It's honestly amazing how much some people can get done; correspondingly but not always overlappingly, it's horrifying how little some people do in their personal lives.

I think you'll be able to manage fulltime work! (Certainly you have a better chance than I do)

[brin_bellway]

>>I usually have exams for about 80% of my subjects, but probably no more than 40% of my total grades come from exam scores.<<

40% isn't unheard of in my own experience, but it's definitely on the low side. I went and checked the exam weightings on my three remaining courses and they're [50, 55, 50]; some of my previous courses had 70 or even 80% of one's total grade come from exams.

It makes sense that a distance university would be heavy on exams, since exams are when they're most confident that it's actually *you* doing the work. They don't see you in class every week, they don't see whether or not you looked guilty when you clicked the checkbox swearing you didn't plagiarise this assignment. But they looked at a scan of my passport before agreeing to put my picture on my student ID card, and when I go to the community college a professional invigilator checks that student ID and keeps an eye on me as I do my work, and I suppose there's only so much you can cheat if 80% of your work is done under those conditions.

[contrarianarchon]

Fair; that is an average taking into account many no-exam subjects, and I'd have many classes within the 50-60% range.

... most of my assignments are still submitted online and the cheating rate in some of my tests had to be seen to be believed! There were people just out-loud discussing the questions!

(To be fair that teacher did have a crackdown after that but I feel like he should have just failed a bunch of those people there and then; you shouldn't need due warning to start actually following the rules)