Class Schedule Study of UMM Faculty Teaching Loads
By Eric Klinger

 

Abstract

An analysis of UMM class schedules during five academic years suggests that UMM teaching loads have increased in both number of credits taught (mostly after 1970) and sections taught (mostly after 1999).   Because of incomplete information and other factors, this analysis is only an approximation and is appropriate only for comparisons between years rather than between academic units or faculty members.   It is subject to numerous qualifications.   It presumably understates effective increases in teaching loads because it excludes other important changes in expectations of faculty activity.

Introduction

The purpose of this report is to track faculty teaching loads over the years of UMM's existence.   To do this, my students and I examined the class schedules for five years: 1965-66, 1969-70, 1974-75, 1997-98, and 2003-2004.   Because this was a very imperfect process, the results cannot be viewed as providing precise estimates of teaching load and cannot be applied precisely to comparisons among particular divisions, disciplines, or individual faculty.   However, they are probably sufficient to provide a rough comparative overview of trends over time.  

Summary of Results

The results indicate that teaching loads have risen over the years, in numbers of both credits and sections taught per year.   Numbers of credits have risen 7% over 1965-66 and 14% over 1969-70.   Much of that increase occurred after an increase in standard course modules from 3 to 5 credits in 1970.   More strikingly, numbers of course sections have risen 35% since 1965-66 and 36% since 1969-70, much of it in the transition from quarters to semesters.   The latter change was also accompanied by a reduction in the standard course module size from 5 to 4 credits, which accounts for the lack of a comparable further rise in numbers of credits taught as a result of the transition to semesters.

The change from quarters to semesters in 1999 creates a problem for comparisons.   That is, an instructor teaching a year-long sequence of a 4-credit course would be credited with 3 sections and 12 credits per year under the quarter system but 2 sections and 8 credits under semesters, even though the teaching effort was identical.   However, multiplying the semester numbers by 1.5 makes them comparable to the quarter-system numbers.   Therefore, the numbers presented here for 2003-2004 have been converted to their quarter equivalents by multiplying them by 1.5.

The two major changes in configuration of the UMM curriculum--increase in course module after 1970 and shift from quarters to semesters with course-module reduction in 1999--were both intended by the University Senate (in the first instance, Senate minutes for 3/12/70; in the second, 1/11/96) to leave teaching loads unaffected.   That is, the course-module increase was to have been accompanied by a reduction in course numbers, and the quarters-to-semesters change (with a modest decrease in size of course module) was to have been accompanied by course repackaging that would be load-neutral.  

However, the numbers in this class-schedule analysis indicate a ratcheting up of teaching loads, although in different ways, at each of these time points: an increase in credit loads after 1970 accompanied by insubstantial change in numbers of course sections taught, and, after 1999, an increase in numbers of course sections that left credit loads only slightly lower.   This becomes clearest in the convergence of the two curves in Chart 2, which indicates a substantial increase of 50% from 1997-1998 to 2003-2004 in median number of courses taught (in quarter-system equivalents), accompanied by a small decrease of 5% in median number of credits taught (again in quarter-system equivalents), although median credits during 2003-2004 still remained 13% higher than during 1969-70.   Subjective reports from colleagues indicate that the increase in course sections effectively increased workload, regardless of the relatively neutral effect on credit loads.

What follows are the methods and conventions used in counting teaching assignments and numerous caveats and cautions regarding interpretations of the results.   These are followed by the results of this analysis in Table 1 and Charts 1 and 2.

Sampling of Years

I sampled years that I judged to have taken place after previous major curricular changes had stabilized or before major changes were to take place.   There were three such major changes in the history of the campus:   1960-64, when the first UMM curriculum under the quarter system was gradually put in place; 1971, after the University mandated a change in course modules from a standard 3 credits to a standard 4 or 5 credits (UMM chose a 5 credit module); and 1999, when the University mandated a switch from the quarter system to the current semester system.    I consequently selected the years 1965-66 (after relative stabilization of the original curriculum), 1969-70 and 1974-75 as years before and after the major course-module increase, and 1997-98 and 2003-2004 as years before and after the switch from quarters to semesters, with allowance for the new curriculum to restabilize.   We were unable to locate a class schedule for winter 1966.   For this we substituted winter 1965.

Conventions Used To Count Courses and Credits

The count:

•  Omitted part-time faculty, division chairs, directors of athletics, others with major administrative or staff responsibilities, and coaches of major intercollegiate sports, insofar as I could identify them.

•  Omitted courses listed as taught by "staff" unless there was other information readily available as to who was staffing them.   Class schedule revisions were generally not available.   That information became readily available on the web from fall 1999 on, but to preserve comparability with the earlier printed class schedules, this information was not used because it would have somewhat increased recorded teaching loads.   To fill in the missing information would have required a much more meticulous historical reconstruction than I chose to undertake.

•  Omitted directed studies, on-line, and internship courses.

In the case of labs:

•  If lab was merely mentioned in the course entry and not separately listed, no credits were counted beyond those assigned to the course.

•  If lab was listed separately, credits were assigned proportional to the number of hours the lab was to meet.   In accordance with the policy of the Division of Science and Math, natural-science labs received 0.67 hours of instructional credit per hour of scheduled lab meetings per week, provided that other course meetings equaled the number of credits assigned to the course.   Where the number of credits assigned to the course exceeded the number of nonlab class meetings per week, the excess was subtracted from the instructional credits assigned to the labs in the course.   These separately listed labs, even though part of the same course, are listed in the tabulation as separate courses, because they were often taught by various faculty members other than the lecturer.

•  If more than one instructor was listed for a single-section course, we generally gave proportional credit (rounded up to nearest credit) to each instructor.

•  Variable-credit courses were assigned the maximum credits listed.

•  Double-listed courses were counted as one course.

Cautions

Although we have been careful, I can guarantee that this compilation is not error-free.   Especially the older class schedules were in type-written form with hand-written corrections and sometimes hard to read.   However, because our random errors would probably cancel each other out, and our systematic errors would probably be comparable across years, the comparisons among years should be reasonably valid.

These figures are intended purely for campus-wide comparisons across years.   They should not be used for comparisons across divisions, disciplines, or individual faculty.   This is partly because of differing conventions for calculating instructional credit hours per course and partly because of variable incompleteness of the records.

The Staff designation is used in class schedules when instructors have not yet been assigned to courses, perhaps because they had not yet been hired, by the time the class schedule was distributed.   However, it appears that sometimes the designation was used for lab sections when all or most members of a discipline taught lab sections of a course.   Because some class schedules used this designation more liberally than others, especially in the case of some science courses, individual loads may have been underestimated.

The number of courses is somewhat inflated by the large number of separate sections of music and PE courses that carried only one credit and by the number of separately listed labs in the natural sciences.   This limits the utility of the measure.   Nevertheless, each course or section places its own demands on a faculty member's attention and time.   The figure is therefore not meaningless.

The estimates of teaching loads provided here are important quantitative indicators, but they are not the whole story.   Two omitted components of teaching load are particularly important.   First, these estimates take no account of course enrollments or student credit hours taught.   Obviously, large course enrollments increase required teaching effort.   Second, the estimates do not encompass unquantified changes in demands on faculty time, such as increases over time in the effort expected of faculty in conveying course materials so as to appeal to a variety of learning styles, increased emphasis on written work, increased pressures arising from introduction of formal teaching evaluations by students, increased expectations of faculty effort in advising and mentoring, addition of on-line courses that are not counted toward teaching loads, increased demands for accountability, with its attendant increase in bureaucratization and reporting responsibilities, increased effort to keep up with rapid technological changes, and probably other diversions of faculty time.   Technological change has increased productivity but has also raised time spent in communicating with students in e-mail, messaging, and the web.   These changes amplify the effects of increased numbers of course credits and sections taught.

Acknowledgements

Much of the tabulation of class-schedule information was performed by three students: Lonnie Bradford, Rebecca Guimont, and James Gambrell, whom I thank warmly for their hard work.   I spot-checked their work and made numerous adjustments, most because of new information regarding divisional policies on teaching assignments.   I also thank the Registrar's Office for digging out old class schedules.

Statistical Note

In the table and figures that follow, mean refers to the arithmetic average (sum of the values divided by the number of values), median refers to the middle number, than which half the values are larger and half are smaller), and mode refers to the value that occurs more often than other values.   (A value is, for example, the number of credits or the number of course sections taught by a faculty member.)

         Table 1

Class Schedule Analysis for All Years

		Number of Courses			Number of Credits
Year	Term	Mean	Median	Mode	Mean	Median	Mode
1965wf-66s
	Winter	2.64	2	2	9.30	8	8
	Fall	2.38	2	2	9.75	10	10
	Spring	2.28	2	2	7.80	8	8
	All 3 terms mean	2.43	2	2	8.95	8.67	8.67
	All 3 Terms Sum of Quarterly Averages	7.30	6	6	26.84	26	26
1969-70	Fall	2.34	2	2	8.44	8	8
	Winter	2.32	2	2	8.22	9	10
	Spring	2.54	2	2	8.63	8	8
	Full Year Mean	2.21	2	2	7.83	8	10
	Full Year Sum of Quarterly Averages	7.20	6	6	25.29	25	26
1974-75	Fall	2.29	2	2	8.95	10	10
	Winter	2.34	2	2	9.34	10	10
	Spring	2.47	2	2	9.78	10	10
	Full Year Mean	2.36	2	2	9.35	10	10
	Full Year Sum of Quarterly Averages	7.10	6	6	28.07	30	30
1997-98	Fall	2.59	2	2	9.84	10	10
	Winter	2.56	2	2	9.78	10	10
	Spring	2.53	2	2	8.81	10	10
	Full Year Mean	2.56	2	2	9.48	10	10
	Full Year Sum of Quarterly Averages	7.68	6	6	28.43	30	30
2003 - 2004	Fall	3.61	3	3	10.22	11	12
	Spring	2.93	3	2	8.99	8	8
	Semester terms
	Full Year Mean	3.27	3	2.5	9.60	9.5	10
	Full Year Sum of Semester Averages	6.55	6	5	19.21	19	20
2003-2004	Fall	5.42	4.5	4.5	15.32	16.5	18
	Spring	4.40	4.5	3	13.49	12	12
	(Semester terms
	in quarter-system equivalents)
	Full Year Mean of Semester Averages	4.91	4.5	3.75	14.40	14.25	15
	Full Year Sum of Semester Averages	9.82	9	7.5	28.81	28.5	30
	(both in quarter-system equivalents)

Chart 1

Chart 2