Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/550

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544
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

The reports were first classified into 39 sets, each set representing a single class within a single college, the electrical engineering being considered separately from the mechanical engineering students, and the sexes being treated separately within the College of Arts and Sciences. A miscellaneous group was introduced to comprehend the few graduate and special students who represented activities too heterogeneous to form a typical set.

In this series of tables there was indicated the average and the highest and the lowest weekly record of each class in each college. Only a single specimen (Table 1) is here printed—that of the civil engineering freshmen. The figures in parenthesis after 'meals' denote the number of students who gave six hours or less, i. e., an hour a day or less, to their meals, while similar figures after 'support' denote the number of students therein represented.

'University work' is the sum of the first four items.

Table 1.

Specimen of the first series. C. E. Freshmen. 43 cases.

Topic. Average. High. Low.
Lectures 11.55 23.00 7.00
Laboratories 8.28 26.00 2.5
Shop and field 4.96 22.00 0.00
Outside study 26.27 44.50 10.00
(University work) (51.06) . . . . . . . . . .
Amusement 12.55 29.00 0.00
Physical exercise 11.93 25.00 3.50
Meals (12)8.55 16.25 2.92
Sleep 48.11 57.50 34.00
Unclassified 6.71 21.50 0.00
Support (12)5.09 35.00 0.00

The chief interest of the investigation attaches, however, to the second series of tables, which are derived from the first series by division by six (to reduce to a single day basis) and by combination in various ways. We thus are able to secure (1) a comparison of classes, (2) a comparison of courses, (3) a comparison of the sexes, and, finally, (4) the daily time of that hypothetical being, the average Cornell student.[1] Save in the last, the extremes of variation have been omitted in these derived tables.

The division into 'courses' corresponds, naturally, to the division of the university into colleges, viz., arts and sciences, law, medicine, veterinary medicine, agriculture, architecture, civil engineering and mechanical engineering.

The College of Medicine in Ithaca has two classes (1st and 2d year); the Colleges of Law and Veterinary Medicine have each three classes, which are here treated as first year, junior and senior; all the other colleges have four years.


  1. Hypothetical because, of course, the time would never correspond in actuality with that of any single student.