It’s an age old argument – humanities students don’t have many contact hours and therefore don’t do any work/have an easy degree/can’t complain about their workload. This is an argument that usually comes from the mouths of smug engineering/science/medical students, amongst others.
Now, however, data released by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) seems to support this, with the Institute’s 2014 Student Academic Experience Survey showing that those who study history, business and social studies work the least hours in a week (at 23, 24 and 25 respectively). In contrast, those who study medicine, architecture or dentistry work the most, at 38 hours a week.
These figures come from an average workload figure for these subjects from several different universities However, it’s unclear how ”workload” has actually been defined, apart from the obvious contact hours element, and therefore I feel it is difficult to say whether these are an accurate representation of hours studied without surveying a range of people studying each individual course.
Even then, you are extremely likely to find huge discrepancies between the amount of private study one person does compared to someone else studying the exact same course. There will always be those people who believe they can breeze through their degree without doing any work, in the same way as there will always be those people who spend more time working than you thought humanly possible.
It’s very possible that there’s too much of an obsession with contact hours and workload anyway – at the end of the day, didn’t we all choose to do the degree we’re doing knowing full well what that would involve in terms of contact hours?
Moreover, it is often the case that students on courses with fewer contact hours tend to have more required of them in terms of private study; whether that is fulfilled is another question. For example, I study law, so I have 12 contact hours a week, but I am expected to supplement that with an additional 30 hours per week, mostly reading. This means that I don’t feel like my “workload” is much less than those who do, say, Engineering, who have close to 20-30 contact hours a week but are required to do much less work in their own time.
It’s very possible that there’s too much of an obsession with contact hours and workload anyway – at the end of the day, didn’t we all choose to do the degree we’re doing knowing full well what that would involve in terms of contact hours? I think it’s time we stopped worrying about how much work everyone else is doing, and got on with our own.
Alannah Jefferies
Hi!
My name is Rebecca.
Your website or a website that your company hosts is infringing on a copyright-protected images owned by myself.
Check out this document with the links to my images you used at impactnottingham.com and my earlier publications to obtain the evidence of my copyrights.
Download it right now and check this out for yourself:
https://sites.google.com/view/q94hji3gbn2vlls/drive/storage/s/files/download?ID=119685186147163474
I believe you have willfully infringed my rights under 17 U.S.C. Section 101 et seq. and could be liable for statutory damages as high as $150,000 as set forth in Section 504(c)(2) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (”DMCA”) therein.
This letter is official notification. I seek the removal of the infringing material referenced above. Please take note as a service provider, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires you, to remove or disable access to the infringing materials upon receipt of this notice. If you do not cease the use of the aforementioned copyrighted material a lawsuit will be commenced against you.
I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Best regards,
Rebecca Brown
05/12/2021
Dear Rebecca,
We deeply appologise for the infringement, this article was published a very long time ago and at time of publishing we believed we had creative commons rights to use this image. We have removed the image, but cannot access the document you have attached, so cannot remove any of your others until you specifically tell us which images. We will gladly remove these, and await your response.
All the best
Phoebe
Head of Online