Colleges offer courses during a prescribed term or semester. The traditional semester is 16 weeks long in the fall (late August through early December) and spring (mid to late January through mid-May). How many credits you earn for a course is measured by the time and attention you put into learning. For instance, if you take a course that has 3 contact hours per week (hours during which you are in \u201ccontact\u201d with an instructor), you will earn 3 \u201csemester credit hours (SCH)\u201d upon successfully completing the course. While the length of the semester may vary, a 3 SCH lecture course equates to 3 contact hours per week in a traditional 16-week semester.<\/p>\n
In addition to traditional 16 week semesters, Austin Community College (ACC) offers sessions of various lengths,\u00a0 including 12-weeks, 8-weeks, and others. However, to ensure the same number of contact hours are achieved, the shorter session means more contact hours per week. For example, a 3 SCH course has 48 contact hours (3 x 16 = 48). If you took the same 3 SCH course in a 12-week semester, you would have 4 contact hours per week (12 x 4 = 48). Similarly, the same 3 SCH course in an 8-week semester would result in 6 contact hours per week (8 x 6 = 48).<\/p>\n
ADVICE:<\/strong> College courses require study time outside of the class or contact time. A general rule is that you should plan for at least two hours of study\/preparation outside of class for each one hour of class time. If you take a \u201cfull load\u201d of 12-15 SCH in a semester, that means you should plan for a total time commitment of 36 hours per week for a 12 SCH course load and 45 hours per week for a 15 SCH course load. That\u2019s why this courseload represents a \u201cfull-time\u201d student. Many students opt for a part-time course load of 6-9 SCH because of outside work or family commitments. Plan and manage your time wisely.<\/p>\n An Associate Degree typically requires a student to complete 60 SCH and a Baccalaureate Degree typically requires the completion of 120 SCH.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Colleges offer courses during a prescribed term or semester. The traditional semester is 16 weeks long in the fall (late August through early December) and spring (mid to late January through mid-May). How many credits you earn for a course is measured by the time and attention you put into learning. For instance, if you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":213,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-217","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":{"layouts":false,"page_links":false,"hero_content":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/2023-24-catalog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/2023-24-catalog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/2023-24-catalog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/2023-24-catalog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/2023-24-catalog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/2023-24-catalog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/217\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/2023-24-catalog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/2023-24-catalog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}