<p>I am just wondering if it’s possible to take 6 courses/semester (5 regular + foreign language) in CAS. Thanks!</p>
<p>im sure it is. i know people who have taken 6-7 classes/semester</p>
<p>Yeah, I took six classes last semester. Not advisable, I have to say. Also don’t treat foreign language courses as not-real courses. You have a lot of work to do on a consistent basis for language courses.</p>
<p>yes you can.</p>
<p>Yep you sure can, but make sure you know how much time each class takes (like science classes with labs will definitely take a lot more time and work than some others like Math)</p>
<p>Sounds insane – especially with a language course.</p>
<p>It is pretty standard, most of the engineers I know were taking between 5.5 and 6.5 classes, and it isn’t uncommon in Wharton either.</p>
<p>This is true… engineers need to take more classes since they have more to fulfill. At the same time though, when I took six courses last semester, I was smacked with between 1,000 and 1,300 pages of reading per week, of which 200 pages was in a different language (not for a language course either). If I wanted to stay on top of things and not look like a moron in class, I had to read every page of it. It’s a different kind of work you do in the college than in Wharton or SEAS. Not necessarily more or less, but definitely different!</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure I’m taking 5 courses. But broetchen: what do you mean especially with a “language course?” I would think that they would be pretty easy.</p>
<p>If the OP is a freshman, don’t take 6 classes. </p>
<p>Language courses are one of the few courses that meet everyday and require you to prepare for class everyday. In other courses if you skip or fall behind on the reading no one will know or care. In language courses your grade starts to go down.</p>
<p>If you are taking a new language it can be very difficult to learn all of the new vocabulary and take a lot of time. If you are taking an upper level course (i.e. Spanish 202 or up) it can also be a fair amount of work. If you are taking a language you already did in high school between 110 and 140 levels it isn’t too difficult, but still takes up a fair amount of your time each day.</p>
<p>It’s very interesting for me to know what course requires to read between 1,000 and 1,3000 pages per week including 200 pages on foreign language. It sound that you needed to read 150-240 pages every day including weekends for 15 weeks. You should be really fluent in some foreign language to read 200 pages each week (30 pages each day).</p>
<p>^It was divided between 6 courses.</p>
<p>AA, I took the following courses last semester:
GRMN104 (Intermediate German II) – 40ish pages of reading a week in German
LGST220/820 (Int’l Business Ethics) – 150ish pages of reading a week
LGST101 (Intro to Law & Legal Process) – 80ish pages
PSCI201 (Politics, Society & Social Science) – ranged from 100 to 300 pages a week
PSCI181 (Modern Political Thought) – 150ish pages
PSCI298 (Conservative Regimes) – between 300 and 600 pages a week (my heaviest week was upwards of a thousand pages, and it made me want to kill myself); this is with Dr. Ellen Kennedy, who is notorious for giving a ton of reading; she is also an authority on German politics. The course was broken up into three segments – Thatcher, Reagan and Kohl; students selected one of those segments to focus on, and as a prospective German minor, I focused on Kohl, which meant doing a hell of a lot of reading on him. Unfortunately very little of the quality material on this guy is in English, so in order to not look like a fool when I spoke, I had to read about eight or so books in German… I started doing the reading early on in the semester so I wouldn’t have a ton of stuff to do when I had to talk about Kohl, so I was reading around 150-200 pages of German every week (and as someone who’s not quite fluent, that was a task in and of itself). Meanwhile, there was between 150 and 400 pages of required reading she assigned, and she expected that we look up unfamiliar sources and read the source material before coming to class, so that added preposterous amounts of extra material. Long story longer, PSCI298 was more work than any other course I’ve ever taken.</p>
<p>If you are taking a History or Political Science course, you should expect to read at LEAST 100-200 pages of material a week. If you’re taking a History or PSCI seminar, expect at LEAST double that. On the plus side, by the middle of the semester, I was able to plow through hundreds of pages of reading a day, no problem. Speed reading was a great friend, and though it’s tough to speed read through J.S. Mill, Thomas Hobbes and Karl Marx, learning to read effectively has been awesome.</p>
<p>took 7/7 last year</p>
<p>If you’re taking science/math courses, six or seven is perfectly doable (I usually take six). I could imagine the reading from six humanities courses being unimaginably boring.</p>
<p>Thank you, Chrisw, for your comprehensive explanations. Is it difficult to receive an approval for 6 courses? Is there any formal process for that (application or something like that)?</p>
<p>If you are not a freshman all you have to do is have a decent GPA and ask your advisor. The last two semesters my maximum course loads have been 6. I always drop one after a week or two because 6 courses would be too tough for me, but it is very doable. I never had to fill out any forms, just send an email.</p>
<p>a friend of mine from Penn told me to increase my max course load to the most that i can, even if i’m not planning to take that many courses. That way during the add/drop weeks i have more flexibility. is this true?</p>
<p>^That is true. If you are debating between two courses it is better to be registered in both of them. The add deadline ends pretty early and you don’t want to be in a situation where you wish to switch into a class and have it be full. It doesn’t hurt you at all to be registered in a few extra courses so long as you drop the ones you aren’t taking before the drop deadline.</p>
<p>That’s great idea to increase allowed number of courses. So, what is max course load allowed?</p>