> That's usually 12-14 hours of studying on top of 30-40 hours of classes.

That sounds like an extremely unusual balance of classes vs studying. An 'average' class-load is something like 12-18 credit-hours. That's supposed to mean 12-18 hours of in-class instruction per week. I'm quite curious how you ended up taking 30-40 hours of in-class instruction, and if that was normal compared to your peers.

I was told in orientation (in 2003) to expect 2-3 hours of outside work per classroom hour, and my experience matched that. If these students are facing the same expectations that I faced, then they're getting a 1:1 ratio of classroom:outside hours, which is underworking by a significant factor.

I don't remember what I was told in orientation, but most classes ended up having 2-3 hours of lectures and 2-3 hours of tutorials per week. You were expected to take 5 classes per semester. This gives you a minimum of 5(2+2) = 20 and a maximum of 5(3+3) = 30 hours of classes per week.

Which means my original estimate was wrong, but coupled with holes in schedules, potentially taking extra classes in a semester (I think the max I ever did was 7) you easily ended up spending 30-40 hours a week at school if you were going to all your classes.

That's how it was at my run-of-the-mill European public University. But I did always get the impression studying in the US was much easier.

Sounds about the same. You are just including tutorials which aren't usually included in regular credit hours in the US. Those would be in the "2-3 hours per hour in lecture" block.

Well when you have mandatory presence at tutorials you tend to count them :)

I wonder if that is counting lab time. In the hard sciences those can be a killer. "Quantitative Chemical Analysis", that lab seemed to go on forever. Electronics labs were the roughest because they were open and if you "got it" you were done in an hour, or if not, well, that might be a very long day for you. I distinctly remember a microcontroller class where I had 9 years of in family experience (Motorola 8 bit) and I'd be outta there in a half hour but there would be classmates putting in 8 hours because they didn't really understand imperative programming or whatever.

In the olden days computer science programming was done in labs because few people had the precise combination of machine / OS / compiler / IDE to match the class requirements, things are a little better now...

Interesting. For the first couple of years, thats exactly what my (double, granted) degree was here in Australia.