8.2 Course Hardness - Effort

This note discusses the effort that a student should be expected to put into a course. This is one view of difficulty. Another view of difficulty is the grading standard and this is dealt with in another note.

They are somewhat related because in theory, courses should be designed such that an average student can get an average mark with the average amount of effort and skill. The average mark is a bit tricky, but based on our experience, it is relatively common for instructors to talk what an average mark is; given their subject, level of course, and so forth.

In any event, in this note, we will focus on student effort in a course.

There are courses which are considered by students to be ‘heavy’, ones that take more time and effort than other courses. If the term is balanced using rational thought, these courses should have more credits or academic weighting compared to the others and to balance out the term, there should be one or more courses which have less weighting.

We have no problem with heavy courses; as long as equity and fairness principles are applied. If the total effort is the equivalent to two courses, the reward and contribution of the courses should be comparable. Perhaps the 'heavy' course should take the place of two and be considered a studio course. This would be logical. If it actually requires lots of more time, make it so officially.

Observations...

• Course effort can be related to the program and curriculum design. If a program is designed with load concepts, each term has a reasonable estimate. The courses in the term should ‘sum’ up to this estimate. If too much is being put into one course in the term, the one course’s weight should increase and other material moved out of the term.

• That is, if you have a normal weighting for courses as a .5, and a course is 50% heavier than other courses, it should have a weighting of .75 and there should probably be another course in the term with a weighting of .25.
• If the course program has stipulated the material to teach and the level to teach it at, then overloading the term is a problem created by the curriculum design team.
• If the course program has stipulated the material to teach and the level to teach it at, and this material can be taught within the normal expectations, but the instructor adds additional material or depth of learning because they think it is ‘right’, ‘required’, ‘best’, whatever, the fault lies with the instructor.
• The instructor should not indiscriminately add non-required material to a course, adding to its load, just because it is their opinion. minimum standards. It is unreasonable to think otherwise. We are getting paid to instruct and there should be expectations about high quality instruction given the compensation that is being given.
• Course and program reviews should highlight situations which are i) not in balance and reign in instructors who are adding to the program without oversight, ii) program related and attempt to address the unbalance through a curriculum change process.
• In the case where the program has been poorly designed, it might be necessary to work with all of the instructors in the term to temporarily deal with assessments and effort; to mitigate the risks to students.

Further reading

• Winn, S. (2002). Student Motivation: a socio-economic perspective, Studies in Higher Education, 27, 4, pp. 445-457.