Q. How many minutes are in a credit hour? A. 'It's mushy'

You would think that the groups that accredit colleges would have defined long ago exactly what a credit hour is. After all, this is the basic unit of higher education that defines when a student graduates and how much that education will cost.

Yet this week the president of a college accreditation group testified before Congress that the whole idea of a credit hour is "a mushy concept" that varies from college to college and even changes over time. The new on-line courses have made the concept even more mushy, she said.

You can read the story about this in the Chroincle of Higher Education: Credit hours should be worth the cost.

I spent most of my life as a journalist, so when I became a college teacher I asked my colleagues and my superiors this exact question. What I was told was that a credit hour was the same as a "contact hour," and meant the amount of time I spent in the classroom with students. So for a three-credit class I was expected to be in the classroom for a total of three hours per week and students were expected to spend six hours per week working outside the classroom.

It didn't take long, however, for me to find out that this rule of thumb had become seriously fudged. The classroom hour was actually only 45 minutes long, to allow students time between classes. Also students would violently revolt if I assigned them six hours per week of homework. So there were actually only two and a half hours in the classroom and two hours out of class.

But how much of the time left is actually spent on instruction? If you leave out the time at the beginning of class waiting for students to filter in, leave out the time wasted taking attendance, leave out the time for taking tests, you are left with about one hour per week of genuine instruction time.

I only began to think about this when my college changed from three credit classes to four credit classes. While administrators claimed this was nothing more than reorganization of time, students made it clear to me that there was no way they were going to sit still in the classroom for four hours a week. No way! "Other professors let us leave early," I was told, or "other professors make the last hour optional," or "why can't we use the last hour to do our homework?" Some students simply left when they felt like it and others went on "bathroom breaks" from which they never returned.

I think Congress is on the right track in thinking this needs to be nailed down. But when students who aren't interested in learning team up with teachers who aren't interested in teaching, the 30-minute hour is the natural result.

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