hours in outside study as a preparation for each hour of lecture or recitation work, the relation is evidently unfair, because the laboratory student, in most cases, is obliged to put preparation or outside study time in some form or other upon the work which he has been doing in the practicum. And this will be seen to be true even though, as our figures indicate, the average lecture course student spends more than one and a half hours outside study for each hour of lectures. Thus, if we take the women in arts, who have a small amount of laboratory work, we find 2.52 hours lectures accompanied by 4.63 hours outside study, or, if we take students in law, whose laboratory hours are practically nil, 2.52 hours lectures are accompanied by 5.75 hours outside study. If we may assume, then, between lectures and outside study, a general relation of one to two, we should expect students in medicine to accompany 1.27 hours lectures with 2.54 hours outside study, whereas their actual time as reported is 3.25 hours. Similarly, veterinary medicine reports 4.06, instead of 3.70 calculated, hours of outside study. Either these students have lectures which are more difficult to prepare for than are those of other students, or their laboratory work demands time outside the laboratory. The latter is presumably the case. It seems, therefore, fairly evident that in so far as our reports are truly representative, students in the two medical colleges work both longer and harder than students in other courses in the university.
It is very doubtful whether we can make such an assertion in the case of the students in the various branches of engineering. In the first place, such a discrepancy as that just discussed is not observable. The ratio of outside study to lectures is very close to the two-to-one ratio shown in arts and law. Hence we may suppose that shop and field work require very little outside study and that the laboratory work has been more equably adjusted than in the medical courses. In the second place, field work in engineering, and probably shop work, too, demand less persistent attentive work than laboratory and lecture work in general. The various forms of surveying, for instance, consume much time, but it is seldom that all the members of a surveying section are actively and continuously employed. We shall, therefore, be inclined to think that most engineering students expend more time, but not necessarily more energy, than students in law or arts. Yet the actual discrepancy in the time of these three groups of courses—arts and law, the engineering courses and the medical courses—is considerable; students in the last named courses working two hours, and students in architecture and engineering, one hour, more per diem than students in arts, law or agriculture.[1]
- ↑ Very possibly the time given in agriculture would be higher in the warmer months of the year.
