Course Load Calculator

Because Sleep Hours per Night is multiplied by 7 to get weekly sleep hours before it's subtracted from your 168-hour week, so a change to nightly sleep has a 7x-larger weekly effect than a change of the same size to a once-a-week commitment like Family Obligations. Protecting adequate sleep is deliberately weighted this heavily in the underlying math — sleep is a daily, non-negotiable commitment in a way that most other categories aren't, and this calculator treats it that way rather than as a discretionary line item you could simply trim.

Available Hours/Week for Academics is never allowed to go below zero — the calculator clamps it there instead, which means Maximum Feasible Credits and Recommended Credit Hours both drop to zero once your fixed commitments (work, commute, family, sleep, personal care, and extracurriculars) already add up to more than the full 168-hour week. That result is a signal to reduce a fixed commitment — most realistically work hours or extracurricular time — before adding any course load at all, not a calculator error.

Yes — Study Hours per Credit adds directly to the 1 hour of class time assumed per credit, so a higher value raises the total hours each credit consumes, which lowers how many credits fit into your fixed Available Hours/Week for Academics. Setting this higher (closer to 3, matching demanding STEM or writing-intensive courses) produces a more conservative, sustainable credit recommendation than the Carnegie Unit's minimum-standard 2.0-2.5 range.

It's the ratio of study hours needed at Maximum Feasible Credits to your total Available Hours/Week for Academics, scaled to a 0-10 range — a value near 10 means you'd be using nearly all of your available academic time studying at your maximum load, leaving little slack for unexpected demands. It's not a measure of how hard your specific courses are, only how tightly your schedule is packed relative to the time you've told the calculator you have available.