What are some good dual credit classes to take?

How many classes should a university student take per semester of 3 credit courses?

• In september i will be enrolled in the bachelor of education program and i was wondering how many 3 credit courses i should take per semester ? so that i don't have to much of a work load and how many hours a week of studying it would add up too . because two bio classes have labs and lectures with them..

• Answer:

  It's not as easy as "just take x hours" - there are a lot of factors other than credits to consider. If you're involved in extracurriculars like marching band, athletics, etc... then keep it at 12 hours those semesters and make sure they aren't time-eating classes like labs and writing intensives. Some classes eat more time than others. Labs are an example, for every 1 credit that's 3 hours in lab. Music and PE activity courses are like that too. You want to keep those sorts as low as possible every semester. Some classes don't eat any time at all - you just go to class and that's it. Having one of those "easy A" courses each semester is a good idea. Some classes will require more time studying and doing assignments than others. Writing intensive courses, for example, require papers. How much you have to spend studying in any class depends a lot on you and how well you grasp (or already know) the material. It's not the same for everyone. In the ed department there are courses that will require classroom observations that will eat entire days or weeks from your life. You can't do anything else in that time. Make sure you look at class requirements when you register because professor A doesn't care if you had to be at East Jones Elementary for professor B during his class time. The rule of thumb though should be that 12 hours is a light load, 15 is the load required to graduate on time, 18 is a heavy load, and 21 is an overload. The other rule of thumb is that you should spend 2-3 hours preparing for every hour in class except for lab type courses and lower-level/survey courses which will be about 1:1 (one hour out of class for every hour in class). So, a full 15 hour load of real courses would need about 45 hours of study/prep time in a week. That's why it's called "full-time" when you're only in class about 15 hours. Expect though - freshman level classes are not as time consuming as will be your senior level major courses. A 15-18 hour load shouldn't be too much trouble for most freshmen as long as you don't do something like put 3 lab sciences and an upper math in the same semester. 12 hours with a fairly light load lets you finish with a really high GPA and to have a life that year. It's always easier to drop your GPA later than to try to recover a low one so if you can finish the 1st year very high you will be at a huge advantage going into the second. Many students miss that idea - especially if their parents never went to college. It's simple statistics but it kills a lot of freshmen. You have four or more years to get all those courses done - may as well not try to be in a big hurry to do all the hard ones at once.