Standard Meeting Times
Yale College courses fall into three categories, each with its own kind of time pattern: lecture courses (including lecture courses with discussion sections or with considerable classroom discussion), seminar courses, and laboratories. Lecture courses meet for 150 minutes a week, either in three 50-minute periods or in two 75-minute periods. Seminars, which have limited enrollment in order to facilitate student participation, meet either in one 110-minute period, in one 120-minute period, or in two 75-minute periods. Labs normally meet in the afternoons for three or four hours.
Yale College courses may meet only during certain times, as detailed in "Standard Time Patterns." The standard time patterns are intended both to allow the Registrar's Office to schedule classrooms as efficiently as possible and to ensure that students have as broad a choice of courses as possible. The choice students must make between one course and another is difficult enough; to oblige a student to weigh one course against two or even three others is unfair. If, for example, a seminar were permitted to meet Wednesday mornings from 10 until noon, the students in that seminar would be forced to give up their choice of courses in three popular hours, i.e., 9.25, 10.30, and 11.35. Exceptions to the standard time patterns are rarely allowed, and then only when a course's organization makes the exception necessary, as, for example, when extra instruction time is needed beyond the normal hours provided for in the standard time patterns. Professional commitments, travel arrangements, or professional school schedules are not compelling arguments for exceptions to the standard time patterns.
