Post #1698739

2026-04-24 10:26 UTC

My university just changed the rules for the syllabus for our classes to include a &quot;workload statement&quot; so that the students can know how much time they&#39;ll have to spend working on the class. Didn&#39;t the syllabus used to just be &quot;what you should expect to learn in this class&quot;? When did it change into a legal contract about what work you have to do? Does anyone else&#39;s uni do this? PS. The old rules already required legal statements about how much homework was assigned, how many tests, essays, etc. This new rule is about how many hours/week they should expect to work on the class. I don&#39;t understand how this is supposed to take into account individual differences in study habits, etc. Nor do I understand how this is supposed to address the fundamental issue of &quot;what you get from a class depends on what you put into it&quot;. 😕 #teaching #academia

Replies (5)

@mxp@mastodon.acm.org 2026-04-24 14:38

@adredish Yes, in the European “Bologna” system, the ECTS credits you obtain for a course represent the approximate workload, with 1 credit corresponding to 25–30 hours of work.

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@MCDuncanLab@mstdn.social 2026-04-24 19:37

@adredish That's weird. I've always understood a credit hour was about 3 hours of outside work for an average student. It's even on some websites. My guess is no student is ever spending that much time on my classes. Asking you to put it on the syllabus seems unneeded. Its curious, I wonder if students whose disability requires extra time for assignments, also get a lower credit load qualify for full enrollment. Probably not. https://www.si.umich.edu/programs/courses/credit-hour-policy

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@SmartmanApps@dotnet.social 2026-04-25 00:01

@adredish In Australia courses are each a particular amount of units, which is a guide to how much work there is, and the expectation is that however many hours of lectures there are in a week, you would spend at least that same amount of time working on assignments, etc. This is used for classifying your study as being part-time or full-time

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@quixoticgeek@social.v.st 2026-04-27 11:17

@adredish 20+ years ago when I was at uni we were told it was expected to spend 2 hours outside of class studying for every hour of class. As we had the fullest time table of any course, I pointed out the maths of this meant that there weren't enough hours in a week if we did that... They quietly shut up about it...

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@trashheap@tech.lgbt 2026-04-27 11:28

@adredish Didn't the syllabus used to just be "what you should expect to learn in this class"? AT the institutions ive worked at; they've definitely been used for more than that for a long time (It's been pretty common to ship attendance policies and ADA notices in them for example around here since the early 2000s.) But I think in the past five to ten years a lot more concerns have been shipped into the syllabus and, it's gotten a lot worse; with a surge of it during/post the COVID pandemic.

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