Every student who is studying in American universities is awarded a certain number of credit points for completing their course. The credit points aren’t the same for every course that you complete. The credit points depending on the number of hours of each class that you attend.
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Why Should You Care About American Academic Credits?
You have to know about American academic credits because they aren’t the same as European academic credits. Every graduate program has a different number of credits associated with them.
Your credits are used to determine whether you have to appear for the preparation classes for your course. Your GPA gets affected by the credits that you have. In America, your tuition fees also get affected after assessing the total number of credits that you have.
How Many Credits Do You Get?
As stated, different courses have a different number of credits associated with them. If you are going there for a bachelors degree, you will have a different number of credits allotted to your name for when you are going there for a master’s degree.
The course that you are going to take is measured in the number of credit hours it has. Most of the basic universities though offer around 3-semester hour credits for completing each course. For basic classes in an undergraduate degree, you will more likely get 1 or 2 credit points. But for a master’s degree, you will get around 3 to 4 credit points.
The standard full-time load is 30 credit hours per year. American universities expect their students to have a minimum of 120 to 130 credit hours in case they are appearing for a bachelor’s degree. And around 30 to 64 credit hours in case they are appearing for a master’s degree.
In case you are a lucky student, you might also get scholarships for your next semester. You have provided if your credit hours are in line with the standard requirements in your last semester.
The Quarter Credits
There is something known as quarter credits. Some universities in America use this system of credit rating. These are the universities which have divided their semesters into three parts each year. In this type of university, you need to complete a minimum of 180 quarter credit hours.
Your Credits Affect Your GPA
In America, credits are used to determine the Grade Point Average (GPA) a student is graduating with. For some universities where you might go for advanced studies, they consider the credit points that you had in your previous university. In case you don’t meet the requirements of credit points, you won’t be accepted in the university.
Conclusion
Hence you can secure a better future for yourself by earning adequate credit points. To earn them is not a very hard task. You have to make sure that you attend most of the classes in your semester.
In addition to this, when you pass every subject, you earn credit points as well. But make sure that you don’t mix your contact hours with the credit hours. Contact hours are those where a teacher is teaching something to the student or when the teacher takes a class in labs.
One contact hour is 50 minutes in real life. You can also convert your European credits to the American credits. The conversion rate is 1 American college credit hour is equal to 1.67 European college credit hour.
