AI's Opinion on Weekly Time Needed to Complete an Online Doctorate

So I decided to consult ChatGPT about the time it thought I'd need to commit on a weekly basis to successfully complete an online doctorate in leadership. I gave it my age, academic background including degrees earned, the majors and GPA, my age, and professional experience. It suggest that 12 hours per week of structured, disciplined time, as a baseline, should be adequate, with some weeks calling for more or less depending on the nature of the assignments. I'd love to hear some thoughts from folks who have actually earned doctorates. Here is the exact info I fed ChatGPT:

- BA in Leadership earned from Bellevue University with a GPA of 3.8. Also received an award for excellence in academic writing given to the top 1% of undergraduate students.
- MS is Organizational Performance from Bellevue University with a GPA of 4.0.
- Age 56
- Professional Experience - President of a management company with 380 employees for 9 years, executive level responsibility prior for 20+ years.

Your thoughts on ChatGPT's answer? I was definitely thinking more like 18 hours. I think I spent an average of 6-8 hours per week on my masters.

 

I think there is a wide variance to that question, but those 12 hours per week is an interesting starting point. I think I spent less time than that, but I also didn't move through either of mine with blistering speed, either. For my course-based MBA, I think that number would have been about right.

 

The people I have talked to have said that if you are only doing class part time, that 10-15 hours was about average. The AI answer seems a decent middle ground.

 

While 10-15 hours per week seems axiomatic, I would suggest there is a great deal of variance in that. Course load, curriculum style, learning style, delivery methodology, and much more would go into the actual number. Instead, I would suggest it is very much like a part-time job.

 

I am taking one course (8 weeks course) at a time or two courses per semester at the University of the Cumberlands. I spend an average of 12 hours per week. The good thing about the program is that once I am exhausted, I could take a semester of half a semester off. It also depends of the subject if you have already, I spent only 4 hours per week on Enterprise Risk Management class.

 

That makes obvious sense. 12 hours per week seems reasonable and doable as well.

 

That seems light to me - in the middle of my second Master's and I'm pretty sure I spent about 20+ hours a week on my first Master's - it was an accelerated program, though. And I feel I'm probably putting 10-14 hours in per week on my current Master's. I suppose the doctoral program might be similar in terms of amount of work - only at a greater depth, but in my head a doctorate would be really intense as far as the amount of reading, research, and writing that would be required, and I would expect it to be like a second job - taking up about 20 hours a week. I think budgeting for that would be safe and give you flexibility if it didn't end up taking that much of your time. But I've never done any doctorate level coursework, so I don't know from any experience.

 

Me either. I think like anything else it would depend on a lot of variables like the rigor if the school/program/class, how interesting the course content is to the student, how quickly a student reads and retains, how well a student takes notes, how well a student writes, the quality of the 12-20 hours a student is devoting, how the required reading is written (I do better with books that aim to convey information in a a more direct, approachable manner, as opposed to books that appear to be written merely to impress other academics), etc.