Table 3.
Totals by courses, all classes. Average Day.
It will readily be seen that the high averages of 10.79 and 10.37 hours accredited to medicine[1] and veterinary medicine, respectively, are due to the large amount of laboratory work required by these courses. Medicine has, in fact, the smallest number of lecture hours and the smallest time given to outside study. In a similar way the one hour excess of architecture and the courses in engineering over law and arts is easily traced to the large amount of time expended in draughting, shop, laboratory and field work of various kinds.
These figures raise the interesting question as to whether we can assert that the students in professional courses work harder as well as longer than those in arts. It seems to me manifestly impossible to get behind the figures and answer the question positively by assigning any qualitative value to time spent in 'practicums' as versus lectures. At any rate, it would be unfair to manipulate the figures in accordance with the correlation generally observed in this and other universities that two and a half hours laboratory, or three hours shop or draughting, work are equivalent for university credit to one hour of lecture or recitation. If this relation is based upon the assumption that the lecture-course student spends from one and a half to two
- ↑ It must be borne in mind here that we are comparing a two-year with three-and four-year courses, though there is every reason to suppose that the same tempo is observed in the two years of the medical course taken at New York City.
to be almost identical. Since the work required is identical during the first two years and closely comparable in the last two, we have an additional confirmation of the value that may be placed upon the results as truly representative.
