>>10262018well it all depends. the difference between majors is really huge here even as far as number of hours required a lot of time. sometimes people would graduate in 3.5 years in the first place with the right schedule and can use a light summer semester and one slightly heavy regular semester to graduate in 3 instead.
another thing that's common is that someone has electives or gen eds out of the way so they're like 3 semesters off from graduating strictly by hours but too many of their classes are prerequisites for each other so they can't actually take the specific classes they need to in those 3 semesters. when that happens they can just take 1 or 2 summer courses so they can get on with the other classes they need during regular semesters instead of having to take 4 full ones
