DISTRIBUTION OF TIME OF CORNELL STUDENTS. 547 



hours in outside study as a preparation for each hour of lecture or reci- 

 tation work, the relation is evidently unfair, because the laboratory 

 student, in most cases, is obliged to put preparation or outside study 

 time in some form or other upon the work which he has been doing 

 in the practicum. And this will be seen to be true even though, as 

 our figures indicate, the average lecture course student spends more 

 than one and a half hours outside study for each hour of lectures. 

 Thus, if we take the women in arts, who have a small amount of labo- 

 ratory work, we find 2.52 hours lectures accompanied by 4.63 hours 

 outside study, or, if we take students in law, whose laboratory hours 

 are practically nil, 2.52 hours lectures are accompanied by 5.75 hours 

 outside study. If we may assume, then, between lectures and outside 

 study, a general relation of one to two, we should expect students in 

 medicine to accompany 1.27 hours lectures with 2.54 hours outside 

 study, whereas their actual time as reported is 3.25 hours. Similarly, 

 veterinary medicine reports 4.06, instead of 3.70 calculated, hours of 

 outside study. Either these students have lectures which are more 

 difficult to prepare for than are those of other students, or their labo- 

 ratory work demands time outside the laboratory. The latter is pre- 

 sumably the case. It seems, therefore, fairly evident that in so far 

 as our reports are truly representative, students in the two medical 

 colleges work both longer and harder than students in other courses 

 in the university. 



It is very doubtful whether we can make such an assertion in the 

 case of the students in the various branches of engineering. In the 

 first place, such a discrepancy as that just discussed is not observable. 

 The ratio of outside study to lectures is very close to the two-to-one 

 ratio shown in arts and law. Hence we may suppose that shop and 

 field work require very little outside study and that the laboratory 

 work has been more equably adjusted than in the medical courses. In 

 the second place, field work in engineering, and probably shop work, 

 too, demand less persistent attentive work than laboratory and lecture 

 work in general. The various forms of surveying, for instance, con- 

 sume much time, but it is seldom that all the members of a surveying 

 section are actively and continuously employed. We shall, therefore, 

 be inclined to think that most engineering students expend more time, 

 but not necessarily more energy, than students in law or arts. Yet the 

 actual discrepancy in the time of these three groups of courses — arts 

 and law, the engineering courses and the medical courses — is consider- 

 able; students in the last named courses working two hours, and 

 students in architecture and engineering, one liour, more per diem than 

 students in arts, law or agriculture.* 



* Very possibly the time given in agriculture would be higher in the 

 warmer months of the year. 



