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How much prep time? Results and discussion

Brian Leiter

There were over 1100 votes on the poll about prep time, with the results as follows:

For each hour of class time (for a class you have taught before), how much time outside of class do you typically spend preparing?
Less than an hour
   23%260
About one hour
   23%258
1-2 hours
   25%284
2-3 hours
   19%216
More than 3 hours
   11%123
  See Dashboard »

Consistent with Brennan's supposition, almost half the respondents reported an hour or less of prep time per class hour.  But 30% did report spending two hours or more. I'd be particularly curious to hear from those spending 2 or 3 hours for each classroom hour to say a bit more about the kinds of classes these are, and what they do to prepare.

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19 responses to “How much prep time? Results and discussion”

  1. Elizabeth Harman

    Brian, you explicitly asked about prep time, but not about the other tasks that Brennan was including. He suggested (besides weekly scheduled office hours) that one should spend only one hour per class hour TOTAL on prep, grading, and anything else for the class. As others have pointed out, the will include syllabus prep, posting things on blackboard, individual meetings with students beyond office hours, dealing with cases of plagiarism, etc.

    Just clarifying here — this poll doesn't in any way confirm Brennan's claim.

    BL COMMENT: Is that right? I had thought the claim was only about prep time. All the other stuff will vary with class size, but only one hour for all that seems rather optimistic, even for a small class.

    Reply
  2. Junior TT Faculty with a family

    From the "Adjuncts: Highly Paid Per Hour" post:

    "Now, the general rule is that one should spend no more than 1 hour of prepping/grading outside of class per class."

    I can imagine spending only 1 hour of prep time per 80-minute class for a class I've taught before. But grading would, for me, at least double that time. Admittedly, the grading time is much reduced when the class is large enough to warrant a TA. But even then, I structure the evaluation in such a way as to match homework sets with in-class tests, and I like to grade the latter to get a sense of how the students are doing (and because it is otherwise a lot to pile on the TA's plate).

    Reply
  3. Anonymous

    There's also a difference between how much time one *does* spend on prep and how much time one *should*. As an adjunct, I frequently wing classes because I get paid the same and have the same job security regardless of the prep time I put in. And if the students start looking disgruntled, I just hand out A's like candy and (*magic*) I get good reviews.

    Reply
  4. A Facebook User

    Not sure why this guy's blog posts (hardly scholarly material!) are gaining such traction when it seems to me they've accomplished little except antagonizing people struggling to put food on the table, but that aside:

    The time we spend prepping in classes we've taught is bound to vary, making generalized answers difficult. For my part, the time reviewing material ranges from maybe 20 minutes to close to two hours, depending on the class. Prepping for Intro shouldn't take terribly long, although adding a unit or a reading will of course require more time. In a Contemporary Moral Issues course matters are different because if your course is going to be meaningful to your students it should be tied to current events as well as historical material (imho). One night while in the middle of a unit on capital punishment I spent close to four hours speed-reading everything on the Troy Davis case I could lay my hands on, since his execution happened to coincide with that unit. (Did the same thing with Terry Schiavo in March 2005.) That sort of prepping is a necessary condition for an informed class discussion on those subjects. You can't "wing it."

    If this is about grading as well as prep time, then naturally a stack of tests for one class (25 – 30 students) chews up an entire Saturday unless you use the stairstep method (if you catch my drift).

    Reply
  5. Derek Bowman

    Something else to keep in mind is that adjuncts often have much less control over, and stability in, their course assignments than permanent faculty. If you have to teach at multiple institutions (either simultaneously, or in succession), even nominally "the same" class can require new preps to meet different institutional requirements. And, if you're relying on getting new class assignments to pay your bills (or hedge your bets), you're more likely to take on new classes outside of your main AOS/AOC which require significantly more prep.

    Another factor that this discussion seems to overlook is the different needs and expectations of students at different kinds of institutions. If you think of 'prepping' primarily as preparing to present the material to a class of more or less engaged and motivated students who are already well adapted to college learning and scholarly reading, then your subject matter expertise should making prepping fairly straight forward. But preparing to present the material in a way that reaches students who are struggling or initially uninterested requires more time spent revisiting what works and what does not.

    Given the heavy reliance on adjuncts in community colleges and regional state universities, standard prep time for regular faculty at elite universities is likely to be a very poor proxy for estimating the standard workload of adjunct instructors.

    (I also agree with #4 – this preoccupation with "sob stories" and who you should and shouldn't "feel sorry" for is a sideshow. You don't have to feel sorry for anyone to see how present employment conditions undermine education and scholarship and compromise moral and interpersonal relations among colleagues, advisers, and students in the academic professions.)

    Reply
  6. Justin Kalef

    Thanks for re-clarifying, Liz.

    Not only did Brennan say that he meant one hour all-in, but his whole argument depends on that figure. Perhaps he and others possess superpowers I lack. For myself, I could never achieve such a feat. Never, that is, unless I routinely did very poor work. One explanation for this is that I'm remarkably incompetent. But there are other explanations.

    Reply
  7. Jason Brennan

    Let's agree that I'm wrong, and the 1-hour total prep (for a course you've taught before or for an intro course in your subject area) is overly optimistic. What is a more realistic time, 2 hours outside of class per hour in? 3 hours? Even then, most adjuncts would not be making minimum wage, as many of these stories report that they do. If you spend 180 hours today grading, prepping, delivering, etc., one course, and get paid $3000 for that course, your effective hourly rate is $16.67. This is not wonderful money, but it's close to the median hourly rate for all private workers in the US.

    Derek's points are well-taken, though. Presumably what seems normal to my colleagues and me at an elite private university doesn't reflect what happens to the average adjunct at a community college.

    Reply
  8. Marcus Arvan

    Following Derek Bowman, I also think the question fails to account for differences in classroom time and expectations at different institutions. Not all classroom hours are equal. Let me explain.

    Prior to my current position, I had always–like Brennan–taught courses at research institutions with large classes (75-150 students) where the standard course is 3 credit-hours (MWF classes=50 min, T/Th=1:15). Given that you cannot do/grade daily homework or in-class assignments in classes like this, it is very easy in this kind of situation to prep for a class you've taught before in less than an hour.

    The same kind of prep is *impossible* at present institution, given features of my institution, including class-sizes, meeting times, student expectations, and university expectations. First, our classes are 4 credit-hours, not 3. This means that, in my 3/3 load, I spend 2 hours in the classroom for each of my three classes on Tuesday, and then again on Thursday. Last year, a faculty member from Georgetown (Brennan's institution) taught in a visiting position at my institution. She said she was astonished at how much more work it took. Spending 2 hours per day in a classroom, twice a week for each, teaching Intro to Philosophy or Ancient Philosophy (or whatever) to small classes of undergrads who (A) may have little interest in philosophy, (B) expectations for far more than a pat 50-minute lecture, requires a much larger time and energy investment than teaching a 50-minute class at a research institution.

    Prior to coming to my present institution, my teaching reviews (in 50 minute research university settings) were outstanding. When I got my present institution, they tanked–and because the expectations and setting were so very different. I have found that in order to do an exemplary job in the classroom–which is an expectation in my position–I not only have to have daily, graded homework assignments for each of my classes, but also daily graded in-class assignments for each of them; and, because it has worked wonders, I have standing policy of letting students rewrite term papers.

    The long and short of it is this: before I joined a teaching-centered institution, I got away with prepping the way Brennan advises. This did *not* fly at my teaching-centered institution. I teach all day (6 hours straight) on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I spend all day, everyday–9am to 5pm–MWF, prepping for classes: several hours updating/improving old lectures (which I think I owe to my students), and several hours grading. I have little to no time left during the semester to do research. It is necessary, and it is worth it. And it is what Brennan is missing. He is speaking as someone who only has experience teaching at a research institution–and, for many of us, that is not at all a representative situation.

    Reply
  9. Jason Brennan

    It's worth reiterating, since a few people missed it, that I never claimed that what universities are doing is acceptable, or that they are blameless for how they treat adjuncts. Instead, in the IHE and Chronicle papers I've read, professional adjuncts continually described their situation as if it were just something bad that happened to them, mere misfortune for which they are not responsible. My original post about this a few months ago was just meant to be a corrective: professional adjuncts aren't usually like poor workers both in impoverished parts of the world with no opportunities. Instead, they are to a significant degree responsible for arriving in and staying in their circumstances.

    Reply
  10. Jean

    Jason, I suggest you drop the expression "professional adjunct." Nobody is a professional adjunct. There are people who remain adjuncts for a long time, but they're not professional adjuncts. They're professional philosophers, just like you. This isn't just a verbal issue or a question of etiquette. Yes, there are other "opportunities," as you call them. Many adjuncts don't take them precisely because being a philosopher is a profession–something that involves a huge investment of time and effort as well as a shaping of identity. It's superficial to point out that there are other jobs a person could take, in contrast to the situation of poor workers. That ignores the specific bind that adjuncts are in, which doesn't happen to be equivalent to the bind poor workers are in, but is a bind nevertheless.

    Reply
  11. CWP

    I did originally think that you were opposing adjunct unionization and were trying to show that universities were doing nothing wrong. After you clarified that you are not on the last post, like #4, I don't see what you're doing other than antagonizing people who are struggling.

    I don't think I've ever seen an IHE or Chronicle paper that portrayed adjuncts as being like poor workers in impoverished parts of the world with no opportunities. Issuing "correctives" of adjuncts' accounts of their own experiences based on idealizations from your experience as a Georgetown professor actually strikes me as deeply bizarre.

    People are talking about how they're struggling, and you're trying to debunk their accounts instead of understand them. The "Adjuncts: Highly Paid" post would have looked very different if you had approached it as "Some adjuncts are saying they are earning less than minimum wage. How could that happen?" instead of "Some adjuncts are saying they are earning less than minimum wage. Debunked!"

    Reply
  12. Anonimal

    I'm a little surprised by this conversation. First, I'm not clear why the discussion focuses on prep time for courses one has already taught without taking into account the amount of prep involved in teaching the course the first time around. I don't doubt that the amount of prep time will go down as one settles into a stable set of courses where one has had the time to work out the kinks in material to be covered, presentation of it, etc. What I'm not clear on is why we would focus on wages _after_ that point has been reached. Why not take the average amount of preparation time across the average number of times a course needs to be taught before a significant drop in prep time can be expected?

    Of course, this all presupposes that adjuncts do in fact get to teach the same courses over again, that they have control over course content, and that they get to assign the kinds of assessment tasks that minimize grading. Others have already pointed out that these are innocent suppositions.

    I'm also surprised by Brennan's 'corrective' claim in 9: I'm not entirely sure what he means when he says that adjuncts are responsible for their circumstances in some non-trivial way (the claim reminds me of the standard defense of employment at will, and should be met with the standard rebuttals). Given the inherent difficulties in transitioning from one job market to the next — not to mention the problems about simultaneously being overqualified for entry level positions in the private sector and underqualified for more advanced positions — it's not entirely obvious to me how Brennan's calculation provides any corrective

    Reply
  13. A.T.

    Brennan's comment above (#9) really misses the point of much of the debate over adjunct labor. Indeed, his "corrective" only goes so far. For while adjuncts – yes – are ultimately "responsible" for staying in their circumstances, this is a trivial point. More to the point, I suggest, is that his attributions of responsibility elide the complicity of tenured faculty in perpetuating the exploitative system in the first place. For a pertinent counterpoint to Brennan's, consider the case of Gillian Steinberg, who, rather than scolding adjuncts, has urged her fellow tenured faculty to "acknowledge that our sabbaticals, teaching loads, teaching assignments, and salaries are made possible because of a system that exploits certain workers for the benefit of others." As reported in the Chronicle article linked below, Steinberg has refused further complicity with this system: she resigned. Although en masse resignations by tenured faculty in protest against the exploitation of adjunct labor would likely get the attention of university administrators, I suspect that we are unlikely to see such collective action anytime soon. Still, some collective action on the part of tenured faculty would help the adjuncts' cause more tangibly than rebuking them with "correctives" to their apparently flawed calculations of their hourly wages and their course preparation habits. What point does such a corrective really serve anyway, especially when, as Brennan himself acknowledges in the comment above, that he "never claimed that what universities are doing is acceptable, or that they are blameless for how they treat adjuncts"? I realize libertarians are big on the idea of personal responsibility. So what kind of responsibility is Brennan himself prepared to accept in reforming the system he faults, but from which he benefits? Will he resign in protest, as Steinberg did?

    http://chronicle.com/article/To-Protest-Colleagues-Lack-of/230057/

    BL COMMENT: Unlike Brennan, I am not a libertarian. But I also think the idea that systemic problems warrant individual remedies–such as tenured faculty resigning or declining sabbaticals–absurd.

    Reply
  14. lecturer

    Jason, I really think you need to cite sources for more of your claims. First, a minor point: you say that the average pay for an adjunct is $3,000 per course. You might be right; I haven't researched this extensively. But I continually see it claimed that adjuncts make $2,700 per course on average.

    http://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/economy/2014/02/27/surprising-minimum-wage-jobs/2.html

    That takes us to $15/hour based on your 180 hours/course assumption. Strangely, you seem to reject this assumption as overly optimistic in your comment #7, but for some reason don't allow that to influence your calculations. If we actually take Derek Bowman's points into account, then what hourly wage do we end up with? $14/hour? $13? In any case, they're obviously way below the mean hourly wage.

    Second, you say that stories are reporting that "most" adjuncts are making less than minimum wage. I've done a bit of googling and haven't found anything containing that claim. (Hence the need for citations!) Here's one that cites one individual who claims that "many" adjuncts make less than minimum wage. But that's obviously not equivalent to saying most don't make minimum wage (it seems to me that it would be true if 20% didn't make minimum wage), and even if it were, the main point of the article–and of every similar article I've seen–is that many (which is not to say most!) adjuncts are living in poverty, and so all this business about the minimum wage is a red herring.

    http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2015/04/rally_for_15_minimum_wage_to_i.html

    Third, you now claim that your original post "was just meant to be a corrective: professional adjuncts aren't usually like poor workers both in impoverished parts of the world with no opportunities. Instead, they are to a significant degree responsible for arriving in and staying in their circumstances." I think this is untrue of your posts; you claimed much more than this in them (one was shamefully titled "Adjuncts: Highly Paid Per Hour"). But in any case, with regard to your point about opportunities, again, some kind of evidence or citations are needed. You say in your post that adjuncts have a lot of training and high IQs, and so should easily be able to find good private sector jobs. Was this meant to be a serious argument? In case it was: I could have a high IQ and decades of training in working the cotton gin. This doesn't put me in a good position to secure a job.

    Again, you might be right. But you need to give evidence. In the previous comment thread, you claimed that there's a lot of bad faith on the side of the adjuncts' rights movement (this claim being based on your ironically dubious attribution of the claim that *most* adjuncts make less than minimum wage to the movement). If we are going to question motives, let's start with what lies behind assigning blame to people for their poverty and lack of job security without giving any evidence of having verified one's assumptions.

    Reply
  15. Derek Bowman

    To BL @12: So when someone suggests that individual tenure-track faculty (including those who administer adjunct positions) bear some individual responsibility for their role in maintaining that system you think it's "absurd." But if someone suggests that individual adjuncts bear some individual responsibility for their role in maintaining that system, you think it's "worth a read."

    BL COMMENT: The claims about individual responsibilty in Prof. Brennan's piece were not the ones I thought interesting.

    Reply
  16. lecturer

    I realized after posting that, contrary to what I say in #13, Brennan's 180 hours/course assumption could be interpreted as reflecting the points made by Derek Bowman (#5) and Marcus Arvan (#8). So $15/hour seems like a reasonable estimate of the average adjunct's hourly wage. This is below the median hourly wage in the US and (what seems more relevant to me) way below the mean. And it bears repeating that (i) this is the *average*; many adjuncts are making less than this, and (ii) the adjunct rights movement–which is the target of Brennan's posts–isn't just concerned with the average adjunct, but especially with those who are in poverty.

    Another thing worth pointing out is that this kind of comparison of hourly wages is only minimally informative. It may be that those outside academia in the adjuncts' earning bracket are younger and likely to climb the ladder as they gain experience in their field. For adjuncts, as we know, there are virtually no opportunities for advancement. While the opportunities for advancement for grocery store workers are woefully limited, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they're better than the opportunities available to adjuncts.

    Reply
  17. HappyAdjunct

    Lecturer –

    The $2,700 figure comes from the 2012 CAW adjunct survey (http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf) and is the average for *all* adjuncts, including those with less than PhD credentials. It should come as no surprise that adjuncts with a PhD get a pay bump per class over adjuncts who are ABD or who only have a Master's Degree. The PhD-holding adjunct (which is what I assume we are talking about here) makes an average of $3,400 per 3 hour course according to this survey.

    $3400/180 hours = $18.88 per hour.

    If you don't have a PhD then of course it'd be less. But I'd also suggest that if you don't have a PhD, aren't ABD and about to get a PhD, and you're seeking TT academic employment, you're also living in fantasy land if you think you're gonna get a call back.

    Reply
  18. HappyAdjunct

    Also 180 hours spent on a single 3 hour course translates into 4 hours outside the classroom for every 1 hour in. That appears to be on the extreme upper end of the survey results at the top of this page, so I don't think it's unfair at all to say that people who have a 4:1 ratio are extremely inefficient teachers. They also aren't representative of anywhere near the typical teacher, who seems to be in the 1-2 hour range on the poll.

    Reply
  19. lecturer

    Happy Adjunct,
    The document you link to says that PhD holding adjuncts make $3,200 per course on average (see Table 19 on p. 31). More importantly, as an indicator of pay, this is less useful than the overall per course average. This is because, as the CAW report explains, pay is determined more by the kind of institution than by the education of the instructor. Those with PhD's are presumably more likely to get hired at four year research schools, which pay better. Were the adjuncts who currently only have Masters degrees to get PhDs, we would still have the same proportion of adjuncts teaching at two year colleges, and therefore earning roughly $2,235. (I also don't see why we should assume we're talking only about PhD holding adjuncts here.)

    As for the 180 hours: I got the number from Jason Brennan's comment and assumed it was for a 3:1 ratio. I'm not sure 4:1 is inefficient for many teachers (see Derek Bowman's #5 and Marcus Arvan's #8), but I won't insist on the point. I wouldn't put any stock in the above survey results, though: see Elizabeth Harman's #1.

    Reply

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