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Class Schedule

Classes are scheduled Monday through Friday, with the majority of one-credit courses meeting three times a week for a seventy-minute period. Classes meeting two days per week meet for one hour and fifty minutes for each class period. A class scheduling grid is published each year, and classes are expected to meet within established meeting times as published. Courses carrying less than one-course credit usually meet less often. Some one-credit courses—notably those with laboratories, studios, or seminar formats—vary from the common pattern. Classes are not scheduled between 2:50 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. on Tuesdays to accommodate Labor meetings; classes are not scheduled on Thursdays between 2:50 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. to accommodate College and General Faculty Assembly meetings and Convocations which occur on most Thursdays from 3:00 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. Labor meetings are held on most Tuesdays at 4:00 p.m. The Convocation and Labor meeting times are to be kept free of private lessons, tutorial sessions, required labor, and student conferences.

The class scheduling grid is available as a resource on the Office of Academic Affairs website. The Provost works directly with the Division Council to ensure the scheduling grid is maintained over time. Maintenance refers to both: (a) enforcement of schedule rules, but also (b) flexibility in considering and adopting, where appropriate, modifications to the schedule grid. Berea College’s class scheduling grid will maintain the following principles:

  1. It will facilitate the scheduling of all one-credit courses to meet for a minimum of 200 minutes per week.
  2. It will seek to preserve time for meetings that facilitate the business of the College and facilitate student, faculty, and staff interaction.
  3. In order to enhance student learning and meet students’ diverse interests, it will seek to minimize undesirable course overlaps and be published with corresponding guidelines as necessary. 
  4. It will seek to ensure that a full slate of classes is scheduled across the full day and the full week.
  5. It will facilitate late afternoon extra and co-curricular experiences by requiring that single-section required courses meet between the hours of 8:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays and 8:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays.
  6. It will facilitate the meeting of Labor Program goals.      

Requests for exemptions to scheduling classes according to the published grid for an upcoming term must be submitted to the Provost. Requests for formal modifications to the published grid must be submitted to the Division Council.

Requests to meet for less than the expected 200 minutes per week for a full-credit course must be submitted by the Department Chair to the Division Chair, who will then forward the request to the Provost for consideration. The following guidelines for requesting a waiver[1] are based on similar guidelines developed at Georgetown University.

Requests should demonstrate that:

  1. the course requires academic activity outside class meetings sufficiently in excess of the normal expectation (two hours per credit hour per week) to compensate for the reduced time in class; and
  2. the rationale for the requirements stated above is included in the course syllabus and clearly shown to be relevant to the course’s learning goals. Such courses will typically be research-intensive (where students are undertaking an independent course of research over and above assigned reading) or have an experiential or service-learning component or be designed with a significant tutorial experience; in any case, such courses will require close monitoring of the nature, quality, and quantity of the work done outside scheduled classroom hours.

[1] One credit courses meeting less than 200 minutes per week and which have a waiver from the 200-minute requirement would still meet within a standard block as published on grid.