Course selection opens, you pick five courses that sound interesting, and only afterwards does anybody mention that two of them have labs on the same afternoon. This planner is the step people skip: sit down, put the real numbers in, and look at the semester before you commit to it.
Add a course with its credit hours and rate how hard you expect it to be on a scale of one to five. The tool totals your credits, estimates the weekly hours the load will eat, and labels the whole semester as light, moderate, challenging, heavy or very heavy. It takes about a minute, and it is cheaper than dropping a course in week four.
Plan your semester by adding courses with their credit hours and difficulty level. See your total credits, weekly time commitment, and overall difficulty.
Course 1
How it works
Each course block has three fields: a name, credits, and difficulty from 1 to 5. Credits must be between 1 and 6 and difficulty between 1 and 5, so a fat-fingered 11 gets rejected with a message naming the offending course rather than a silently wrong total. Courses are only counted when both a credit value and a difficulty value are present, which means you can sketch the schedule in stages without breaking the result.
+ Add Course drops in the next block with its own name, credits and difficulty, and Reset clears every field without wiping the courses you have already set up. The name is there for your reading; the arithmetic only looks at credits and difficulty, so a course called “easy elective” with a difficulty of 5 counts as hard and nothing you type changes that.
The maths behind the output is deliberately simple. Weekly time is credits multiplied by three, which is the standard estimate of one hour in class plus two hours of study per credit. Average difficulty is your ratings added up and divided by how many courses were counted, and the label comes from that average: up to 1.5 reads Light, then Moderate, Challenging, Heavy, and anything above 4.5 reads Very Heavy.
A worked example
Four courses: Biology 101 at 3 credits and difficulty 2, Calculus I at 4 credits and difficulty 4, English 102 at 3 credits and difficulty 2, and History 210 at 3 credits and difficulty 3. Credits come to 13, so the weekly estimate is 39 hours before you have opened a single textbook. The difficulty ratings average to 2.75, displayed as 2.8, which lands in the Challenging band.
Compare a lighter version: three courses at 4 credits each, all rated 2. Twelve credits, 36 hours a week, an average difficulty of 2.0 and a Moderate label. The credit totals are close to the first schedule but the week feels completely different, and that gap between 39 and 36 hours with a Challenging rating is exactly what this tool exists to show you before registration closes.
Common mistakes and honest caveats
The three hours per credit rule is a guideline, not a law. A seminar with light reading will not eat six hours a week, and a studio, lab or design course with weekly deliverables will happily eat ten. Treat the total as a planning baseline and adjust it with what you know about the actual courses.
Difficulty ratings come from you, so the average is only as honest as the ratings. If you rate everything a 2 because you have not looked at the syllabus, the label will read Moderate and mean nothing. Be pessimistic in first year, and check the course evaluations or last year’s syllabus if you can find them.
The labels are also coarse. An average of 2.6 and an average of 3.4 both read Challenging even though one schedule is clearly heavier than the other, so read the credits and the hours alongside the word. And the tool knows nothing about your job, your commute, or which days the classes land on. A 13 credit semester spread over five days and the same 13 credits crammed into three are different semesters, and only you can weigh that against the number on the screen. Your school’s own full-time credit rules still decide your status.
Other tools
Once the load is chosen, build the week around it. Put the fixed blocks on a daily planner pdf, shape the rest with the daily routine planner, and line up the assignments with the deadline workload planner so midterms do not all arrive in the same fortnight.
Frequently asked questions
How many credits should I take?
Most schools consider 12 to 15 credits a full-time semester, with 12 as the usual minimum for full-time status and anything above 15 treated as heavy. Your own program may set different numbers, so check before you register.
How is the weekly time calculated?
Credits multiplied by three, using the common rule of one hour in class plus two hours of study for every credit. A 3 credit course becomes 9 hours a week, and a 13 credit semester becomes 39.
What difficulty rating should I use?
Rate from 1 for a light, familiar subject up to 5 for something demanding that does not come naturally. Factor in the professor, the workload you have heard about, and how many other hard courses sit in the same week.
Does it check against my program requirements?
No, it is a workload estimate, not an academic audit. Required courses, prerequisites and your program’s credit limits are things your degree audit or advisor handles, and those win over anything you work out here.
Can I plan two different schedules and compare?
Yes, run one, note the hours and the label, reset, then run the other. Nothing is stored between calculations, so write the two totals down side by side before you decide.