phew OK, finally free for more than a five minute interval at a console.

Comparing our respective situations is worse than apples to oranges, but I guess I'll just tell you what's up with me anyway. Last fall, I took six hours of research credit, where the assumption is that the student works three hours a week for each credit hour (I laughed when I found that out), and three hours of credit for "one" class, classical mechanics.

So first, the research. Some weeks, I only put in fifteen hours, and others it was sixty-five, probably averaged out to just north of thirty. Went to two conferences during the semester. Not by any means normal for the second fall of grad school, but as you know, my project is one of the most competitive in the game, and I'm lucky to have my advisors working so intently with me to get my name out there. I'm writing code (data parsing w/ some calculus), writing papers, reading the publishing record, giving presentations, attending telecons, running some models, etc., so, y'know, exactly what I'll be doing when I get my pedigree. I love it, I think I was born to work on this stuff.

Now, the course. Oh god, what a train wreck. Put on your seatbelts, or skip this paragraph entire, folks, lotsa bitchin' and wallowin'. To start, we covered the first four hundred pages of Fetter and Walecka (skipping chapter 8 only), and used other texts as well several times throughout the semester. My final homework (the last of twelve) covered shocks, hydromagnetics, and all regimes of nonlinear surface (soliton) waves, including tidal bores. It took me so long that I won't be estimating the number of hours, out of sheer self-disgust and embarrassment. We spend the entire time in class deriving the backbone of the theory from first principles, only occasionally pausing to consider a specific example. When I was studying for the final, I realized that the last time I had seen a problem worked out was when I was looking at the study exam for the midterm. This next one's on me; I couldn't even seem to find the time to look at the solutions to the previous homework sets. It wasn't super crucial, because I always managed to complete my homework to 90% or better, even if it damn near killed me. Still, would've been nice to have the time to see how someone else solved the problems, but I just can't afford to look backwards during the semesters. I worked almost entirely alone on the homework and studying, as all the kids in my year took this course last fall. I've also gone into the department's library and dug up old exams from the 1990's in this same course, and it was taught by the same professor! Interestingly, he's really started cranking up the difficulty level since then, in both the depth and breadth of the course. Maybe he thinks that the kids coming through grad school are just getting smarter as the years go by, which is debatable, at best. The students' response to him upping his demands are to work together on the homework, and I believe that they are cheating on the take-home exams. There are several students in the class who suspect a large group of the others to be cheating, and the competition in the grade distribution is very cutthroat, or else I wouldn't bother putting in an extra twenty hours to attempt perfecting the homeworks. After hearing the midterm's class average, I considered demanding that the final be an in-class exam, but had no leverage to do so, since I would be at a conference. Woof. A couple of weeks I only needed twenty hours to do the homework, but most weeks it was closer to forty. Except for the last two weeks that cost me at least eighty hours each to crunch through to get the last assignment perfect (meh, I got a 95%, found out today). C'mon, all of fluid dynamics, shocks, and nonlinear solitons in six or seven lectures of seventy minutes each. No one in the class had even seen fluid dynamics yet.

My undergrad experience was, of course, a bit more in line with yours. Still, I was left to flounder more often than not. Less instruction and more homework, in general, and I think the courses covered a broader range of subjects. Maybe that accounts for some of the discrepancy in credit hours, but nowhere near all of it (see next paragraph). Besides, grades, credit hours, and degrees are just the bookies' way of measuring academic ability. I have a lot of problems with that last sentence, but I try to jump through the hoops. Sometimes.

Oh yeah, and Devac, you're not "normal", even by the standards inside an academic bubble. Embrace it :). Edit: Are you on ResearchGate yet?