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]

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)