USAGE: University "subjects", "modules", "courses", etc.

On 1 Feb 2005, at 8.42 pm, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> > Chris wrote:
> >
> > > A 10 credit module would be good though. :)
> >
> > What's a "10 credit module"?
>
> In Australian unis, and it seems in British ones as well, what I call
> subjects, Chris seems to call modules, and what Americans appear to
> call courses, have different weightings. When you have completed all
> the core subjects and have attained the right number of credit points,
> you have completed what Australians call your course and you can
> graduate and get your degree. [...] The subjects have different
> weightings, depending on the length of time and the amount of
> work involved.
Ah, I don't think that's quite how many American universities
work. I say "many", because, of course, there is no one system
of education in America at any level.  A "course", in American
parlance, is one class.  This quarter, e.g., I'm taking a seminar
on infixation, a seminar on wh-movement, and the second quarter
of Nahuatl.  These classes are called courses.  As for the rest,
there's wide variation, so I'll describe how my undergraduate
education at UT-Austin worked.  To get one's bachelor's degree,
one generally refers to credit "hours".  Usually, the number of
credits equals the actual number of hours one spends in the
classroom per week, and at UT this was also encoded into the
that course's (=class's) numeric designation.  So, Ling 301
is the introductory linguistics class, it meets three hours
per week, and after the end of one semester, if one passes
one has earned three credit hours.  Gk 606Q (the advanced
Anc. Greek course I took) met six hours a week, and I received
six credit hours for it.  And so on.

How many credit-hours one needed to graduate depended on which
college one was in;  I was in the College of Liberal Arts, in
which one needed at least 120 credit hours to graduate, though,
because I had three majors, some of whose requirements overlapped,
I ended up with 160-something credit-hours.  Generally, each semester
one took at least four classes equalling twelve credit hours, though
some classes were more work-intensive and so would increase
one's overall load. (Certain financial aid packages and government
programs would require at least this many hours per semester.)
The program assumed that one would take at least 15 credit hours
each semester, to equal 30 credit hours per year or 120 in four
years.  I got out of this in part because my HS was basically like
a college for one's last one or two years, and so I took eight
advanced placement tests and got 36 credit hours from it,
which meant my overall load could be lighter each semester, and
that I could have three majors instead of one or two.  (Some
people really make a killing off of these advanced placement tests.
I have a good friend who tested out of 62 credit hours.) Anyways,
like your system, 10 is a light semester, 15 is normal, and 20
is ridiculously heavy.  (Though a classmate of mine from HS who
was trying to get four majors [Physics, Astrophysics, Russian
linguistics, Russian literature] was taking 22 credit-hours some
semesters, and got like two hours of sleep per night.)

At private universities like the U. of Chicago, things (can) work
entirely differently: here they're on a quarter system, they
don't have majors but "concentrations", undergraduates have
much more uniform requirements for graduation, different language
requirements, no state-specific requirements (at UT, before
they would accept my US government AP test, I needed to take
another "Texas-element" test on Texas government and history),
many more students are in the dual-degree bachelor's+masters
program, etc.

Oh, on a different note: as for "chook", I will never cease to
be mystified and amazed at Australian dialectology. :)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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