Opinion: Why Labs Should be Worth More than a Fourth Hour
By Angelina Piette, Guest Columnist
Angelina Piette ’23 (Photo Eric Lippe/The Gettysburgian)
Imagine this: you walk into your weekly 1:10 p.m. biology lab. You were told before coming that it was going to be a longer lab and you set your things at the lab bench. It takes the lab instructor thirty minutes to explain the lab before you and your partner dive into it. You watch as the time flies by: 2 p.m., 3 p.m., 4 p.m., 5 p.m. Four hours later, you and your partner finish the lab and are free to leave. You’re exhausted and drained for the rest of the day, thinking about how those four hours spent in the lab were essentially worthless to the eyes of Gettysburg College. Labs are worth no credit at all.
Instead, labs are counted as a ‘fourth hour’ event, which is, according to Gettysburg College’s Academic Course Credit Policy and Declaration Form, a requirement where classes are to meet one hour outside of the three hours spent in the classroom.
Other courses typically assign extra work or ask you to attend lectures outside of the class. Most of the time, you can knock out your fourth hour assignments in the first few weeks of the semester. STEM students in lab-based courses are required to attend labs, which can take anywhere from two to five hours on occasion to complete. This is a weekly occurrence on top of the additional work assigned to students during the lab. What was set up as ‘an hour outside of the classroom’ soon became several hours. The worst part of it all is that this was normalized and the many hours spent in a lab was seen as equal to other classes.
I have taken fifteen lab-based courses. All of these courses were taxing and took up a majority of my time during the week. While I have watched my friends leave class early and spend more time taking naps and breaks throughout the day, I have been stuck in the lab conducting experiments.
Further, scheduling courses per semester becomes a mess due to limited space from mandatory lab sections. Labs block off three to four hours in a day and prevent you from taking other classes you need as a requirement or for your own interest. They are a large reason why I dropped my writing minor; I didn’t have the space or time to take the required classes to fulfill my minor.
As a senior biology and environmental studies double major, I feel as if my work is devalued when I assess my transcript. My credited hours are only a reflection of the lecture courses I took and not of the fifteen labs associated with them. The labs themselves were extremely helpful for my personal growth, but others would never see this based on my current transcript. All those hours amounted to nothing. No credit. No grade. Nothing to represent the hard work and dedication students like myself put toward labs during their time at Gettysburg College. My real question is if this is worth the work? Is it right to reduce the efforts students put into a lab as a ‘fourth hour’ event?
As a student pursuing research beyond Gettysburg College, zero-accredited labs become a much more complicated issue for applying to graduate schools. Many programs ask for your GPA and grades for lectures and labs separately. Graduate schools don’t want to see if you can memorize information and excel in an exam, they want to see if you can perform. Can you take information and apply it to an experiment? Are you capable of conducting your own research? These questions are impossible to answer if your college does not credit or grade labs to assess efforts in the lecture course and the lab as different entities. With the lecture and lab grades combined, graduate schools cannot observe your capabilities. You may be able to perform better in the lab than the lecture component, but graduate schools will not recognize this if labs are not represented as a separate course; graded and credited for to show the schools you apply for that you are an applicable and reliable candidate to work with.
However, this current system could allow students to excel in a way that benefits their GPA. A lab can be used to boost a student’s class grade and cumulative GPA, which can only be achieved if the lab and lecture sections are counted as one course.
Even so, the intrinsic design of a lab includes a separate syllabus, exams, quizzes, and papers, and is essentially identical to the material assigned in a non-lab-based class. Even if the labs are an additional component and may cover the same material as the lecture component, the workload is twice as much as any other class.
According to the United States Department of Education, the legal definition of a ‘credit-hour’ is a “unit of measure that gives value to the level of instruction, academic rigor, and time requirements for a course taken at an educational institution…to establish a standard measure of faculty workloads, costs of instruction, and rates of educational efficiency as well as a measure of student work for transfer students.” I beg the question: why are the students’ time and work put into a lab and the faculty’s academic effort at this educational institution not given any value?
Let’s take the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s system, for example. Credit hours allotted to undergraduate students for MIT subjects are defined by, “hours per week of lecture or recitation, hours per week of lab or field work, and hours per week of outside preparation.” Therefore, if you spend three hours a week in lecture, two hours a week in lab, and seven hours on outside preparation, the total credits received for this subject is twelve units.
What I suggest is not to completely rearrange the system Gettysburg College has, but to give labs credit where credit is due. Since students receive one credit hour per course, I believe a quarter credit should be given to labs. This would directly align with what is stated in the college’s Academic Course Credit Policy and Declaration Form: “quarter-unit courses are the equivalent of 1 semester hour. In lecture-discussion courses, an average of 3 hours of student time per week is claimed. … Applied study earning a quarter-unit meets or exceeds the standard of an average of 3 hours of work per week in a 15-week semester.” Labs, on average, claim three hours of student time per week during the semester and, therefore, meets the expectations set by Gettysburg College to receive a quarter-unit.
Hard-working stem majors and minors deserve to be recognized and valued for the time-consuming coursework they put into classes and labs. Because the school gives zero credit hours to labs, students may even lose the motivation to continue with their
declared majors or minors. I’ve lost my way many times throughout my college career due to a loss of motivation in labs. You tend to forget along the way how cool experiments are; you’re conducting incredible ground-breaking research and learning amazing new skills to carry with you past your time at Gettysburg College.
I ask, is the thrill of the lab really worth it? At this college, where we are told to do great work and excel, how are we supposed to do that if our work is undervalued? Labs should be appreciated and should be recognized for credit hours. By doing so, students would thrive in STEM-based courses in an environment where their work is respected and treated as equal to other courses.
This article originally appeared on pages 8 and 9 of the March 2023 edition of The Gettysburgian’s magazine.
