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Opinion: Stop Making Classes Longer Than They Need To Be

Most NYU classes are 75 minutes long. The ones that are longer shouldn’t be.

03.28.23
Opinion: Stop Making Classes Longer Than They Need To Be (Manaal Shareh via Washington Square News)

New York City, NYby Naisha Roy

This story was originally published on New York University’s Washington Square News.

There’s only one thing worse than sitting in a murky auditorium, listening to a professor lecture for 75 minutes: sitting there for double that time. That’s what I had to do last semester in my first-year seminar, which met once a week for an excruciatingly long, two-and-a-half-hour period. I felt myself zoning out near the halfway mark during every week’s class, no matter how hard I tried to concentrate. Classes longer than the default 75-minute block fail to retain students’ attention, and NYU should avoid them at all costs — if not eliminate them entirely.

Courses at NYU must meet for a minimum of 750 minutes per credit, meaning that a four-credit course requires a total of 3,000 minutes of instructional time — equivalent to 50 hours over a semester. Most classes adhere to the 75-minute time block we know and love, meeting two to three times a week. Others, however, meet for nearly three hours in a single session once a week. These long class periods are detrimental to students’ retention of the material and are, frankly, boring.

Most research suggests that breaking up a lecture with a hands-on, interactive activity every 15 minutes is ideal. This is doable during a 75-minute period, in which one or two volunteer-based activities — whether they entail the professor posing a question to the class or allowing two minutes for students to discuss a quote with their neighbors — are enough to give students a break from all the information they are absorbing. However, there’s only so much professors can do during a three-hour-long class.

Read the rest of the story at Washington Square News.

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