Course credit where credit is due

Princeton University, unlike most American universities, does not operate on credits. We require a minimum number of courses for a degree. The senior thesis is given special weight, but that’s not really a course. Every class offered in the course catalog — with the notable exceptions of the humanities sequence and Integrated Science — is counted the same as any other.

Unlike at Princeton, most American universities assume — quite reasonably — that students should be given more credit for being in a classroom more often. Classes that demand attendance six times a week should probably be measured differently from classes that meet three times per week.

I noticed this in my sophomore fall term at Princeton. A science course had lecture for three hours per week, plus three hours of lab, plus an hour of precept. A language class met six times per week, for 50 minutes each session. By contrast, a Near Eastern Studies class met for just two 50-minute lectures per week, plus a 50-minute precept.

There are, I think, three possible rationales for suggesting that especially “busy” classes should be given extra weight. Two of them seem to me problematic.

The first argument is that “busy” classes — by which I mean courses that demand a lot of time in class, like labs or introductory languages — are more difficult. This is not necessarily the case. Whether a course is difficult or not varies by student, and the University neither can nor should get into the extremely tricky business of weighing the difficulty of a course and then assigning extra weight to the “hard” classes. Some engineering students find it a serious struggle to produce a decent English essay; many English majors would be hard-pressed to perform multivariable calculus. Talents are varied, and Princeton cannot possibly evaluate with anything like the necessary precision which classes are harder than others.

The other potential argument for why “busy” classes should be given extra weight is that they make greater demands on one’s time overall: This argument is stronger, but, I think, still insufficient. It is probably the case that in most classes that meet most frequently — introductory languages and laboratory sciences — students engage in a lot of preparatory work outside the class. But “Bridges” is notorious among undergraduates for demanding little outside effort, despite being a laboratory course, whereas some three-hour-per-week seminars assign extraordinary amounts of reading. The figure is also too variable: Some students read swiftly, others are quick at math, and some have a talent for languages. We cannot estimate reliably how much outside effort a class will require of any given student. (It will also vary based on what grade the student considers acceptable.)

But what the University can measure — what it already does measure — is the amount of time every class requires a student to be in a particular place. It makes a real difference how often a course mandates that a student spend specific times each week in a specific location. This is qualitatively different from the diligent biologist who does extra lab work on weekends or the studious historian plumbing the depths of Firestone for background reading. All classes require outside study and all research projects require individual effort, and there are too many variables to tame these hours into a constant. What we can definitely measure — and already do — is “class-hours.”

Laboratory classes should count more: They demand three more hours of student time each week, locked in the schedule. Language classes at the 100 level should count more because they usually meet five times per week — sometimes six.

To a small extent, Princeton already does this. The humanities sequence and Integrated Science are infamous for the demands they place on students’ time: What often goes unremarked is that they actually call students into a classroom more often to begin with. The humanities sequence meets twice as often as the average humanities class, and Integrated Science holds two three-hour labs every week. The University seems to have recognized the demands these courses make by listing them, officially, as double courses.

Some American universities lock their weighting system to the number of hours a course requires, so a course that meets for three hours is worth three credits and a course that meets for seven hours is worth seven credits. This seems to me too extreme. Georgetown, by contrast, uses a slight gradation between three credits for a basic class and four credits for a “busy” class. The advantage to this latter model is that it acknowledges the objections mentioned above: Class hours are significant, but they do not measure everything. Princeton should acknowledge that some courses demand more structured effort without forgetting that the real business of learning goes on outside the classroom.

Brendan Carroll is a philosophy major from New York City. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.