Planning a class schedule is difficult for any student. Finding a way to balance the right amount of credit hours, class difficulty, and making sure it does not interfere with work or home life takes time and patience. Of course there are those classes that refuse to adhere to carefully plotted schedules. These are classes that fill up every section on the first day and the classes that never seem to have enough sections. These are also the classes are only offered during certain semesters. Scheduling classes is especially hard on science majors.
Most science majors must complete about 60 or more credit hours total to graduate. To complete a major in biology, 69 to 71 credit hours are needed and at least 44 credit hours need to be from a biology class. For chemistry, there needs to be at least 59 credit hours. This is not including the general education classes.
Most science classes have a lab that brings the total credit hours for the class to four. Few students take the maximum 16 credit hours allowed. The average number of credits taken, for a full-time student, is usually 12 credit hours. The first two years of a student’s college life is dedicated to completing the general education requirements. That basically leaves two years for a student to complete both their major and minor classes. Divide 60 credit hours by four semesters to get exactly 15 credit hours, excluding all other classes required for the mandatory minor program.
Focusing only on the biology major, most classes required for the major only offer one or two sections. Some are not even offered after four p.m. The prerequisite classes are available every semester yet sometimes classes that need to be taken together, like Bio-150 and BIO-201, are not offered the same semester.