Most Summer courses are assigned a unit value.
During the regular semester, one unit represents approximately three hours of work per week by the student, including both class attendance and preparation. Laboratory, discussion, quizzes, or review sessions may or may not be given a unit value. The unit value of each class is listed in the Berkeley Academic Guide.
As Summer Sessions is on a compressed schedule and each session is a different number of weeks, the best way to determine your weekly workload is to focus on the total amount of work hours (15 hours/unit) and divide that by the number of weeks in the session.
Example:
For a 3-unit course in Session A (6 weeks), students should expect to spend a total of 45 hours over the 6-week period; this means that you can expect approximately 7.5 hours of work per week for that particular course (45 hours divided by 6 weeks = 7.5 hours per week).
Students should expect to spend more time per week per course in the summer than during the regular Fall or Spring semester.
For information on variable unit courses, please refer to our article on How to Change a Course’s Unit Value.