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I found an exam online from the MIT that states:

You have two hours (academic time, 110 minutes) to complete the exam.

What is this academic time unit and where does it come from?

David Richerby
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Jules Lamur
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4 Answers4

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The 10 minute interval given here seems to be common in the US, while in Europe 15 minutes is also in widespread use, but some universities also use 5 minutes.

It is to solve a rather practical scheduling problem: If one lecture ends on the hour sharp, and the next begins on the hour, you would have only zero time to walk an often non-zero distance to get to your next lesson/lecture/exam/whatever, requiring asymptotically infinite velocity to cover that distance - a theoretical and practical impossibility.

In order to solve this, European universities invented the so called "academic quarter", which is in use at some universities until today. It means that events start 15 minutes after their scheduled time.

The abbreviations c.t. (for cum tempore, en. "with time"), which means 15 minutes after the scheduled time and s.t. (sine tempore, en. "without time") which means exactly at the scheduled time stem from this. In some European universities (especially german), times are assumed to be c.t. unless stated otherwise.

Berkeley calls this 10-minute interval "Berkeley time", and MIT seems to prefer "academic time", although I have never seen it been used with intervals, only with instants in time so far.

There are many variations of this scheme, and many universities have their custom practices. Some start at the hour sharp and end five/ten/fifteen minutes early, some start five/ten/fifteen minutes after the hour and end sharp, and at some universites lectures both start five/ten/fifteen minutes late and end five/ten/fifteen minutes early, and maybe some universities use even other schemes (a comment refers to seven past the hour).
At my university, the academic quarter is used both at the start and end, since our campus is rather large and for some locations, you actually need almost 30 minutes when walking, and 20 when talking public transport in between those locations.

From personal experience, universities tend to move away from using c.t. times, and rather list actual (s.t.) start times on official resources/documents (e.g. 10:15 as start for a lecture), while students and professors would still refer to those lectures by their time slot (in this case 10 o'clock lecture) and make use of whatever length their university uses as "academic quarter" in colloquial speech.

(Addition from comments):
At some universities, the academic quarter is also used as the time students have to wait for the lecturer. If the lecturer is late, but does not arrive within the academic quarter without any more information, students may assume the lecture is cancelled and can leave without the fear of missing any material.
(I recommend not leaving without being sure this is policy at your own university as well)

Polygnome
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    Europe's a big place. Ten minutes is the norm at the British universities I've worked at. – David Richerby Apr 07 '18 at 23:39
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    I was an MIT undergrad and don't think I ever heard the words "academic time" used, but definitely things ran from :05 to :55. (Except that when I was in the Concert Choir, rehearsal started on the hour.). I've also seen :00 to :50, not only in academia but also as the psychotherapist's "fifty-minute hour". – Michael Lugo Apr 07 '18 at 23:43
  • @MichaelLugo Same here, MIT grad, never heard of "academic time". – Franck Dernoncourt Apr 08 '18 at 00:21
  • @DavidRicherby You don't even have to go that far. In my university, the STEM fields use c.t. times and soft sciences use s.t. - Its often a source of confusion when taking a class from another faculty. More and more times get marked as :15 s.t. for that very reason. – Polygnome Apr 08 '18 at 00:39
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    Why the &$%! don't they just list the actual start time of the various classes and events? – DanielSank Apr 08 '18 at 01:42
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    In the US, I'd be more used to classes etc. starting at the scheduled time and ending early. So a session that starts at 10 AM and covers two hours academic time would end at 11:50. Frank's answer indicates that other combinations of starting late and ending early are also used. It might be worth updating the answer to mention those possibilities. – David Z Apr 08 '18 at 03:12
  • I think it depends on the campus size. My university has 15 min purely because you needed 15 min to get between classes, and sometimes that wasn't even enough. We started on the hour and finished 15 min before the following hour. All the times were stated as x:00 to x:45 so it was pretty clear. – stanri Apr 08 '18 at 06:44
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    in Europe 15 minutes is widely used in many countries citation needed. –  Apr 08 '18 at 07:12
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    An interesting consequence: If a university allocates credits by hours per week, with a M/W/F class being 3 credit hours, and if the credit hours represent 50 minutes of instruction each, giving a total of 150 minutes of instruction per week, some universities will therefore set the T/Th classes to be 75 minutes each, so that they too will total 150 minutes per week. I suspect this is less about being careful with the math than it is about not giving professors with T/Th classes an opportunity to ask for additional compensation. :) – Aiken Drum Apr 08 '18 at 07:14
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    @DanielSank Because it's easier to just say "ten o'clock lecture" than "five-past-ten lecture". – David Richerby Apr 08 '18 at 09:20
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    “In European universities, times are usually assumed to be c.t. unless stated otherwise.“ in some/many German universities that's not true. – DonQuiKong Apr 08 '18 at 10:34
  • @NajibIdrissi [citation needed] - what more then the link to wikipedia for the academic quarter do you need? – Polygnome Apr 08 '18 at 12:25
  • @DanielSank Because for a lecture from 12 to two, students from the previous lecture would be expected to have left the room by 12 o clock, and students from the lecture that starts at 12 would expect to enter the room at twelve o clock. This is especially true for rooms with regulated access, the stated time means you can enter the room at that time, but the actual lecture/event starts later. this is especially true for exams - an exam from 12 to 15 means you can enter the room at 12 (while going through the entry check), and actual work on the exam starts at 12:15. – Polygnome Apr 08 '18 at 12:32
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    @AikenDrum If it's a state school, the number of minutes per week and the number of class meetings per semester is probably set by state law. In Texas these things are nano-managed by the state legislature. We have a law that says syllabuses have to be within 3 clicks of the main page, e.g. And laws about how many graduate hours you need to teach this or that class. People who never saw the inside of a college classroom are dictating minutia about college education. – B. Goddard Apr 08 '18 at 13:27
  • @Polygnome If the Wikipedia article were itself sourced, instead of presenting a list of countries then perhaps this would work. There are sources, but one of them is for a European university, three out of ten are there to explain that the "quarter" does not exist anymore at some university, two of them are about past practices, and so on. –  Apr 08 '18 at 15:17
  • At Leiden University they have a thing called "Leids kwartiertje" - Leiden's quarter (hour). Some classes I attended used it, some didn't. Usually classes would start when (it looked like) all students were there. (I attended bachelor classes there in 2010) – Belle Apr 09 '18 at 07:25
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    Just as a side note, in Poland, in addition of lectures having 15 minutes breaks to allow travel time, there was another meaning of 'academic quarter' - one which is used even outside of university context. It meant that when somebody is 15 or more minutes late, you can assume he is not coming at all. It was used both for deciding to not wait for late teacher anymore and for not waiting for a missing friend in front of the pub. I'm not sure how well it has aged into times when everybody has mobile phones and can be just called if he is coming... – Artur Biesiadowski Apr 09 '18 at 11:31
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    Similar to @ArturBiesiadowski: In Belgium the "Academic quarter"/"Academisch kwartier" is understood to be the 15 minutes after the official start of class that students are expected to wait for the professor to arrive. If they don't show up in that time and haven't communicated that they will be later yet, class is dismissed and everyone can leave with guarantee that they won't have missed out on any material. – DonFusili Apr 09 '18 at 12:15
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    At The Other University in Cambridge, MA, classes unofficially begin at seven past the hour. – Matthew Leingang Apr 09 '18 at 17:22
  • You state that at some European universities things start 15 minutes after the official start date. At every US university I have attended, things end early rather than start late (so a course runs from 1 pm until 2:20 pm). If this is common in the US, it is a difference worth emphasizing. – Stella Biderman Apr 09 '18 at 20:36
  • In Norway (at least the institutions I've been in contact with), the academic quarter isn't implied anywhere, it's explicitly baked into everything. The lectures say they start at 10:15, not 10, for instance. Keeping the tradition alive while being reasonable enough to actually be consistent with what times they state. However, having the same word for "hour" and "session" in our language messes it right back up. – Arthur Apr 10 '18 at 09:20
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From MIT's Term Regulations and Examination Policies (mirror):

Classes begin five minutes after and end five minutes before the scheduled hour or half-hour.

Hence a "two-hour" lecture/exam lasts 110 minutes at MIT.

Franck Dernoncourt
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It is a scheduling problem. If you schedule two lectures directly after one another, then you need to add some time for the students to walk from one lecture hall to the next. So an "academic hour" is less than an actual hour, to allow for that.

Maarten Buis
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    Of course, they could just start each successive class 10 minutes later instead, but this gets weird. – zibadawa timmy Apr 07 '18 at 21:02
  • In Queens University Belfast, our classes start and end 5 minutes before the hour to allow for this. Giving us 10 minutes between classes to walk to the different building on campus. – Dean Meehan Apr 09 '18 at 09:13
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At many colleges, "1-hour" classes are 50 minutes long to provide 10 minutes of break time between classes. For example, a 2-hour class starting at 10:30am would end at 12:20pm, which is 110 minutes long.

limits
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    My classes in Trinity College, University of Dublin, follow that scheme, but a two-hour class has a ten-minute break in the middle (and a three-hour class has two breaks). And we still end ten minutes early. – TRiG Apr 08 '18 at 14:52
  • Likwise, U of Toronto starts all classes at 10 minutes after the nominal posted start time. An older way of saying the same thing was to announce a meeting "at 2:00 pm for 2:10" or sometimes "come at 7:00 for 7:30"; in the latter case, the half-hour window for arriving could be used for socializing or finding a good seat, but the business of the meeting was expected to start sharply at 7:30, with no concessions to latecomers. – CCTO Apr 09 '18 at 19:37