Kunal Patel: Students need a more accurate measure than just units to determine workload
By Kunal Patel
Feb. 8, 2013 12:00 a.m.
As first passes for class enrollment begin next week, many students may pause to decide how many units to enroll in for the coming quarter.
However, what many students might not pause to consider is how accurately a unit load reflects the actual workload of a course. A typical course load in the College of Letters and Science consists of anything from 13 to 19 units.
Without detailed knowledge of the work a particular physics or English course entails, enrollment decisions can be difficult to make.
To help alleviate some of these problems, the UCLA Registrar’s Office’s website should list information about the estimated number of hours students will have to spend outside of the classroom on a given course.
A unit is traditionally assumed to consist of one hour of lecture and two hours of outside study, according to an email statement from Martha Winnacker, executive director of the UC Academic Senate. However, the breakdown of lecture versus outside study may not hold true for all classes, Winnacker added.
Little work would be required on the part of the registrar’s office to provide information on course loads. This information is already available – just not to students.
Course evaluation averages, which break down statistics such as workload pace, difficulty and out-of-class time spent on work for a given course, would be an optimal resource for students.
Currently, these averages are only available via request. But a general statistic like an average of the results from three quarters of a class – especially if different professors teach the same course – would protect anonymity and would not include specific names of faculty or students.
These evaluation averages could be used to inform prospective students and help professors teaching the same courses plot the pace of their classes. This would also decrease the chances of one professor assigning substantially more work than another for the same course.
With this information, however, students might be tempted to flood courses with a particularly light work load. But tools like Ratemyprofessors.com and Bruinwalk.com already offer similar opportunities for students to pick out the lightest class offerings.
Access to this information would be especially helpful when the unit count is misleading. For example, the work involved in seemingly benign two-unit physics laboratory courses is roughly equivalent to the time consumed by a three- to four-unit course in most other departments – physics laboratories consist of three-hour laboratory sessions every week and lab reports that can take several hours to complete.
Efforts to provide information similar to evaluation averages are already underway.
Last spring, the Undergraduate Students Association Council Academic Affairs Commission worked with the Common Collaboration and Learning Environment on a project to help students gauge the workloads of courses before registering.
Last fall, for the first time, students could preview syllabi for upcoming quarters before enrollment periods and see the dates and frequencies of tests, papers and major projects.
The syllabus preview is a step forward, but should be accompanied by more information.
The best way the university can assist students during enrollment is to make more information available to equip them with an understanding of what the coming 10 weeks will look like.
Email Patel at [email protected] or tweet him at @kpatel. Send general comments to [email protected] or tweet us @DBOpinion.
