Quarter Hours to Semester Hours Converter

Imagine yourself as someone with a pile of transcripts in front of you, and imagine that you’re the registrar in an admissions office. You flip through the pages. What does the registrar see? She doesn’t understand what’s going on: the numbers don’t adds up.

The registrar isn’t questioning your intelligence or your performance. In fact, you may have done quite well. No: you went to one kind of school, which records its hours in quarter hours, but now you’d like to go to another school, which records its hours in semester hours. There is a conversion problem here.

The Math Is Easy, But The Strategy Is Important

That means there is a difference between how much time was spent studying for each class in each system. Semesters space out learning; quarters compress them. When you translate from one to another, you are translating effort. To convert quarter credits to semester credits, you should of multiply by two-thirds.

It looks easy enough, but the real world gets messy. Let the calculator above do the easy math for you, and then think about what messes up the process. Generally the big issue is rounding. In a five-quarter-hour class, it converts exactly to 3.33 semester credits. But most schools don’t give out fraction credits; they round them off. Some round to nearest half credit. Others round to the nearest whole number. A tiny number round down to be safe. That will cost you credits.

Let’s say you take ten classes, each one of which rounds down a third of a credit. You’ve lost three full credits worth of progress! At the beginning, this isn’t significant, but it accumulates over time. You might not notice it until you’re flat. Remember: It’s the sum of your parts.

The tool lets you enter each class individually, which is important because it lets you view the rounding effect on a class-by-class basis. For example, what appears to round off perfectly in theory (i.e., a biology lab) may end up being devalued in reality. Why? Because receiving university doesn’t treat lab time the same way yours does. Labs aren’t lectures. While a lecture may be worth fifteen hours per credit hour, a lab could be thirty or even forty-five. Without accounting for this, you’ll think the lab will count toward a lecture, but in fact it won’t.

Another frequent problem arises from residency requirements. In many universities, they expects you to take a minimum number of credits on campus in order to graduate. Let’s say you transferred forty-five quarter hours, which converts exactly to thirty semester hours. That sounds like it should be fine. But suppose the university has a residency rule that says you must take thirty-one semester hours in house. Now you’re one credit shy. Mathematically speaking, your credits convert correctly. Administratively speaking, it don’t. Know the distinction between these two.

These flaws are evident in the reference tables packaged with the tool. They illustrate how a four-quarter-hour course becomes a three-semester-hour course. And they illustrate how an elective that’s two quarter-hours long could get rounded down and dissapears. That’s not a problem, that’s simply how semester catalogs function. But it does highlight the importance of knowing what you’re measuring. Are you measuring finished learning outcomes? Or are you measuring something like seat time?

Because if it’s a fraction of a credit, don’t let it destroy your plans. Examine your particular courses, examine labs as separate entities, check the residence requirements, and use the converter to find out where you actualy are. Then you’ll know whether you have to take an extra elective. It is better to do this sooner then later.

Strategy: The math is easy. The strategy is what matters.