Talk:Carnegie Unit and Student Hour

Credit Hour

This page redirects from credit hour. In reference to American universities, I'm not sure that this page is entirely accurate. For example, the units are not entirely time based. Credit hours refer both to the quantity of classtime and also the quantity of completed (and passed) classes.

Credit hours toward graduating are acquired only by achieving passing grades in classes, and a student's "class load" is measured in credit hours: number of classes taken in a marking period. Also, a college can set the number of credit hours for a class. It is not always equivalent to the amount of time spent in the classroom. At The Ohio State University, for example, freshman engineering classes are 4 credit hours for 8 hours of class per week. Also, science classes with labs also do not follow the simply time-based rules. ~Kruck 14:29, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Hello Kruck, your observations, of course, are valid and true. It is important to remember that the Carnegie Unit standard is not an absolute standard, more of an ad-hoc, de facto standard, now widely recognized and accepted. Here are some reasons for each of the issues that you raise:

• re "credit": I agree that when a course is passed, the student receives "credit." Still the course is based on 3 Carnegie Units. I would be opposed to trying to create a Wikipedia page just for "credit hour."
• re "labs and other": There is much less agreement about how to treat "lab-type" course (which is where the freshman engineering class falls) as compared to traditional courses. Some school state that 3 hours of lab contact time equals 1 hour of "lecture" contact time, others use 2 hours of lab contact time. The reasons for this are quite vague and obscure, having to do with "application" time (in lab) versus "concept" time (in lecture), or some such thing. Another reason could be that administrators (and students) want more time with the instructor to cover difficult concepts but do not waht to pay any more money for the time needed with the instructor to learn them. In any case, someone with better outside references should try to explain these differences in the article.

Maybe that helps. SteveMc 18:14, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Wait, 1 CH = 50 minutes? Confusion? -Guest — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.232.46.162 (talk • contribs) 17:55, 13 May 2007

Well, Guest, all that I can say is the standard is 50 minutes of class time = 1 credit hour. SteveMc 18:14, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Is there any way to convert back and forth between the "Credit Hour" and the ECTS credit system ? Or do the systems have completely different roles ? Kristian Joensen 20:37, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Information from WASC

I was bold and added some more current information, that I received from WASC. I'm sure this information must be somewhere else on the Internet, but since I only can confirm it via email, here is the contents of the Email message I received from George Bronson of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges:

The typical standard is 240 minutes per week for 36 weeks would amount to 1 Carnegie Unit. That is for a full, 36 week school year. One semester would be 18 weeks with 0.5 Carnegie Unit. However, most schools don’t want to work with decimals, so they multiply everything by 10. So, for 36 weeks it would be 10 Semester Units; for 18 weeks would be 5 Semester Units. You could probably check with a high school registrar for additional information.

This was in response to my question:

Do you know if WASC has a standard for how many classroom hours equals one secondary credit? And where I can find this standard?

I hope someone can find a more public source, and change my reference tag. I don't have time to do this research at the moment. But I wanted to have a more updated page, so there isn't misinformation going out. -- Jacob J. Walker, Twin Rivers Adult School —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.15.232.115 (talk) 20:54, 5 November 2009 (UTC)