As college students, we are all aware of the ‘credit hour’ system. Here at Ohio Northern University (ONU), full-time students are required to have twelve credit hours or more in a given semester. But what exactly does that mean, and is it the best system for modern academic tracking?
I do not think so. The credit hour is a needlessly complicated, confusing unit for measuring a student’s progress through a program, it does not accurately measure student workload, and there is no concrete ceiling for what a credit hour actually entails.
According to ONU’s Registrar’s Office page, our credit hour policy follows the guidelines set forth by the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Title 34, Part 600.2, which states that a credit hour can either be defined as:
One hour of class time plus a minimum two hours of outside work per week for approximately fifteen weeks per semester.
Or an equivalent amount of work of other academic activities, such as laboratory work.
That means that one academic ‘credit hour’ at the majority of colleges and universities, including our own, is meant to represent around three hours of total weekly work. In a standard twelve credit hour semester, that is around thirty-six hours of work per week.
But wait, ONU defines an instruction hour as fifty minutes, and out-of-class learning as one hundred minutes per credit hour. So one hour of instructional time and two hours of out-of-class learning is also unclear as it seems the definition of an hour is also called into question.
The total hours per week for laboratory courses also seems to be needlessly confusing, with each criterion listed as ‘variable’ times. I would, however, challenge the claim that the total hours worked per week is two and a half.
The academic labs I have taken have often been valued as one credit hour, meaning they should represent around two and a half hours of weekly work. That math adds up, right? The labs I have taken have lasted two hours and forty-five minutes per week… oh wait, that is already more than the table ONU provides defines as minimum weekly work, and that does not even account for time spent working outside of the laboratory.
Take an organic chemistry lab for example.
You have some pre-lab tasks to do, such as ensuring you understand the procedure and how to go through it safely.
Then, during the lab period, you conduct or set up a reaction, gather some data and samples to run tests on later.
After the lab period, you often have work to do as well. Data analysis, running tests on samples, constructing lab reports, and doing any additional assignments that may have been assigned to you for the lab course.
That one credit hour course suddenly seems to feel like a two or three credit hour course when you spend hours analyzing NMR spectra.
That is where an important word from the CFR’s definition of a credit hour comes in: “minimum.”
Sure, some classes might abide by the estimation, giving around three total hours of work per credit, but some might not.
The poorly constructed definition of what constitutes a ‘credit hour’ can lead to some classes being disproportionally valued for how much work goes into them. If the ‘minimum’ expected weekly work for a full-time ONU student taking twelve credit hours is thirty hours, twelve times the estimated two and a half on their minimum credit hour table, then what is the maximum? Thirty-five hours? Forty, a full-time job? Forty-five?
ONU is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), meaning they abide by the HLC’s standards, including section B.1.d of their Assumed Practices, “the institution adheres to policies on student academic load per term that reflect reasonable expectations for successful learning and course completion.”
That still does not give a concrete definition for what the ceiling of a credit hour really is. The credit hour is too flexible in its denomination; if it does not give a reliable way to track the effort put in by students, and if it is not necessary to track course completion, what purpose does it serve?
Obviously this is not something ONU can change alone; they even cite that they follow the federal definition of a credit hour, the main standardized unit of program progress.
However, we can push for a better standardized system, one that is intuitive and more accurately represents the effort students put into each of their classes.
The credit hour should have a more concrete definition. It should have a defined minimum and maximum amount of work per credit in order to give students a better understanding of what is expected for any particular course.
The credit hour also should represent one hour of work per week, both in and out of class or lab. It should be obvious that an hour is an hour. This eliminates the division between lecture and academic activity credit hours while also making the credit hour more intuitive.
If the credit hour is supposed to track student work, then it should track student work.