Sounds like the UK too. All my school friend doing non-STEM courses would ask me how many "contact hours" we had per week.

I can't remember exactly how many, but once you included lectures, scheduled labs and tutorials, was not that far from 9-5 (minus the standard university-wide Wednesday afternoon sport slot).

The friends would go quiet and say "oh, we have 12".

And that didn't even incude the "non-contact" hours in the labs grinding the coursework until security shooed us out late at night so they could lock the building. Good times (in retrospect, especially).