| -- Can you give me an estimate of how much time I will spend working?
I introduce you to unalove's magic GPA/hours calculator. It's fuzzy math at its finest, but we at the University of Chicago don't have use for practical things like numbers, anyway. The calculator makes a few faulty assumptions, and is based on my and my friends' experiences in science, social science, and humanities classes. I should say right off the bat that certain honors classes and classes like O-Chem expect a 10-15 hour/week commitment from the outset.
The assumptions:
a) Every class is 3 hours long.
b) A high grade correlates to more work
c) Your professor is not batty, gives A's, and does not grade, like some professors do, in numerators without denominators or in squiggles.
Say if I wanted A's in all my classes, I'd have to spend ten hours a week on each. I take four classes a quarter, each of which last for three hours.
(4*(3+10))= 52 hours/week.
That's a lot, and while it's not impossible, it means a lot of serious work.
But say that you're beginning to get used to the idea that you don't need to get an A in every single class, and that an A-.... heck, even a B+... is a grade that you're more than happy to live with. How much are you going to be working for your B+? My own best guess is about 4 hours per 3 hour class.
(4*(3+4))=28 hours/week.
That's not bad! That's not bad at all! That's a little bit less than a 9-5 job, time to do coursework well and have time for other things.
The most reliable sources on GPA's at Chicago show that the average is about a 3.25, and I would say that the average student works about 30 hours a week on schoolwork, with a standard deviation as large as you wouldn't believe. The number of kids who work straight through the weekend every weekend balance out the number of kids who guzzle PBR on a Tuesday night. |