Loading Course Load Hours Estimator…
| Course | Contact hours a week | Study hours per contact hour |
|---|---|---|
What is genuinely left after work, travel, sleep and everything already committed.
38.5 h
14 h of that is timetabled and 24.5 h is study nobody scheduled for you.
Every multiplier above is one you chose. Plenty of institutions publish a planning convention in their handbooks — two hours of independent study for each hour of teaching is the one most often printed — but that is a figure an institution decided to use, not a measurement of your subject, and a lab-heavy science and a reading-heavy humanities course are nowhere near each other on it.
The honest way to fill this in is backwards: log a fortnight of what a course actually took you, divide by the contact hours in it, and use the number you measured. An estimate you checked against reality once beats any published ratio permanently, and it is the only way to catch the course that quietly costs three times what its timetable suggests.
A printed timetable is a document about rooms. It tells you where somebody has to be at ten on Tuesday, and on most degrees the hours it names are the minority of the week. The reading, the problem sheets, the drafting, the lab write-ups and the revision are all real work with real durations, and none of them appear anywhere except in the gaps. Fifteen timetabled hours can be a fifty-hour week, and the person living it usually discovers this in November.
This estimator adds the invisible half back. For each course you give the contact hours and a multiplier — how many hours of your own work each timetabled hour drags behind it — and it returns the weekly total, split so the taught portion and the untaught portion are both visible rather than merged into one number.
Many institutions publish a planning convention in their handbooks, and two hours of independent study per hour of teaching is the one printed most often. It is worth knowing that the convention exists, because it is what the credit values on your modules were designed around. It is not a measurement of anything, and it was never meant to describe a particular person taking a particular course.
The variance underneath it is enormous. A lab session may need forty minutes of write-up and a two-hour seminar may need eight hours of reading before anyone can speak in it. Language courses front-load practice that a maths course spends on problem sets, and a second-year module in your strongest subject costs a fraction of a first-year module in your weakest. So the multiplier here is set per course, by you, and the tool reports the overall ratio your figures imply rather than imposing one.
The honest way to use this is to stop guessing. Log a fortnight of what one course actually takes — the reading you really did, not the reading on the list — divide by that course’s contact hours, and use the number you measured. It will surprise you in both directions, and it will keep surprising you until it stops, at which point you have a figure worth planning with.
Doing this catches the specific failure this tool is for: the module that costs three times what its timetable suggests. Two contact hours with a multiplier of four is a bigger week than five contact hours with a multiplier of one, and no timetable, credit value or module title distinguishes them. Only a measured ratio does.
Set the hours you can genuinely give against the total, and the answer is either spare capacity or a deficit. A deficit does not resolve itself evenly. The taught hours have rooms booked and registers taken, so they survive; the study hours are the ones that quietly get cut, which is precisely backwards, because the study is where most of the marks are.
There are only four honest responses, and choosing between them in September beats discovering them in January. Drop a course while the deadline for it is open. Lower a multiplier you can actually justify, having measured it. Find the hours somewhere else — fewer shifts, a shorter commute. Or accept that one module will get less than it deserves and pick which one on purpose rather than by exhaustion.
On the module descriptor rather than the timetable, since the timetable shows only the weeks currently scheduled. Descriptors usually break the figure down into lectures, seminars and laboratory time, and the total of those is what belongs in the first column.
Yes, but not as a multiplier of contact time, because they barely have any. Put the weekly hours you expect to spend in the contact column and leave the multiplier at zero, which counts them at face value without inventing preparation behind them.
Not by itself, since a full-time degree is designed as a full-time occupation and many are described that way in the regulations. It becomes a warning when the total exceeds what you can actually give it, which is why the hours available matter more here than the raw figure.
Only indirectly, and it should not be the whole basis of that decision. Registration ceilings, funding conditions on full-time status, prerequisite sequencing and visa requirements all constrain a load in ways arithmetic cannot see, so take the weekly figure to an adviser alongside those.