Indicator 62
Student Credit Hours by Course Level and Faculty Appointment, 2003-04 to 2007-08
Student credit hours (SCH) are one measure used to assess faculty teaching workload. Understanding it requires some familiarity with how courses contribute credits toward a degree. The typical undergraduate degree at UC, for example, requires a student to earn 180 credits. To amass these credits, students take courses worth between one and five credits each. The number of credits a course carries is an indicator of its academic intensity and workload for students and faculty alike. Particularly intensive courses are worth five credits, less intensive courses are worth three, two or even one credit.
SCH is defined as the number of student enrollments in a course times the number of credits available from it. A four-credit class with 50 students generates 200 SCH; a two-credit class of 15 students generates 30 SCH. In this respect, SCH measures how much teaching faculty do across classes where enrollments and credits hours vary.
The amount of teaching that UC faculty did increased about 7 percent between 2003-04 and 2007-08. In 2007-08, Senate faculty accounted for 58 percent of all teaching; lecturers (the next largest category of faculty) accounted for 27 percent of all teaching.
Senate faculty are more likely to teach upper-division and graduate and professional courses than lecturers or other faculty. Nonetheless, Senate faculty still accounted for 46 percent of all lower-division SCH in 2007-08; lecturers provided 34 percent.
Source: UCOP "T.I.E." Faculty Workload data collection.
Senate faculty includes professorial series faculty (full, associate and assistant professors), lecturers with security of employment or potential security of employment, acting professors and professors in residence; lecturers are non-Senate Unit 18 members; other faculty includes a variety of non-Senate faculty titles, such as acting assistant professors, health sciences clinical professors and other non-student instructional assistants.