Unless you were planning to graduate in 3 years or less, I've personally never seen anyone experience this.
Advisors should have worked with you to make sure your semester workload floats at around 40-50 hours a week, 60 hours at most during a bad semester. Some people actually care about retaining the material they're learning - taking 4 engineering classes a semester is a waste of time and likely detrimental to learning. It's usually 2-3 engineering classes plus a few easy blow off classes a semester to get all done in 4 years.
It was absolutely detrimental to learning and retention.
We were on a quarter system (really trimesters, since one quarter is the summer quarter), with 48 classes required to graduate from engineering, which is 4 classes per quarter for 4 years assuming you don't have any AP credits. Only a handful of the 48 are allowed to be non-engineering, econ, or math.
Most classes that would be a 14 weeks in a semester system were not broken up differently - they were crammed into 10 weeks to fit into the quarter system.
Advisors should have worked with you to make sure your semester workload floats at around 40-50 hours a week, 60 hours at most during a bad semester. Some people actually care about retaining the material they're learning - taking 4 engineering classes a semester is a waste of time and likely detrimental to learning. It's usually 2-3 engineering classes plus a few easy blow off classes a semester to get all done in 4 years.