Phase 1 Student Workload Policy
Responsible: Office of Educational Affairs, Senior Associate and Associate Deans
Audience: Students, Faculty, Staff
Approved by: CCIA
Approval Date: March 5, 2025
LCME Element: 8.8 Monitoring Student Time
Policy
Course leadership (course directors, project managers, and coordinators) is expected to plan and manage courses, including all scheduled activities and expected independent work, within the academic workload approved by CCIA. Monitoring is the joint responsibility of course leadership and academic/curricular affairs at each campus. Student perceptions of course workload, which may include student feedback elicited through course evaluations, are monitored in the course evaluations.
Phase 1 Curriculum:
The scientific foundation courses are organized into modular blocks of varying lengths, using multiple teaching and learning formats. The Phase 1 curriculum includes block and longitudinal courses that have scheduled activities.
Scheduled activities include lectures/flipped classroom sessions, Core cases, Team-Based Learning (TBL), labs, small group discussions, standardized patient encounters, clinical experiences and weekly assessments.
Curricular workload includes both the scheduled activities and the preparation for the scheduled activities, asynchronous learning modules, and completion of assignments, quizzes, and checkpoint assessments across all Phase 1 courses that are part of the core medical degree program.
Workload Limits Per Student
- Maximum of 28 hours of scheduled activities per 7-day week
- Estimated total curricular workload in the pre-clerkship curriculum should not exceed 60 hours per week.
- Minimum of 2 half-days for protected study time per week
The total curricular workload for an average student in the Phase 1 preclinical years should be kept to a maximum of 60 hours per week. This should provide time for the student’s personal wellness and social engagement.