546 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Table 3. 

 Totals by courses, all classes. Average Day. 



It will readily be seen that the high averages of 10.79 and 10.37 

 hours accredited to medicine* and veterinary medicine, respectively, 

 are due to the large amount of laboratory work required by these 

 courses. Medicine has, in fact, the smallest number of lecture hours 

 and the smallest time given to outside study. In a similar way the 

 one hour excess of architecture and the courses in engineering over 

 law and arts is easily traced to the large amount of time expended in 

 draughting, shop, laboratory and field work of various kinds. 



These figures raise the interesting question as to whether we can 

 assert that the students in professional courses work harder as well 

 as longer than those in arts. It seems to me manifestly impossible 

 to get behind the figures and answer the question positively by assign- 

 ing any qualitative value to time spent in ' practicums ' as versus lec- 

 tures. At any rate, it woull be unfair to manipulate the figures in 

 accordance with the correlation generally observed in this and other 

 universities that two and a half hours laboratory, or three hours shop 

 or draughting, work are equivalent for university credit to one hour of 

 lecture or recitation. If this relation is based upon the assumption 

 that the lecture-course student spends from one and a half to two 



to be almost identical. Since the work required is identical during the first 

 two years and closely comparable in the last two, we have an additional con- 

 firmation of the value that may be placed upon the results as truly repre- 

 sentative. 



* It must be borne in mind here that we are comparing a two-year with 

 three- and four-year courses, though there is every reason to suppose that the 

 same tempo is observed in the two years of the medical course taken at New 

 York City. 



