  Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental mechanism through which energy stored
in magnetic fields is released explosively on a massive scale, they could be
presented as eruptive or confined flares, depending on their association with
coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Several previous works have concluded that there
is no correlation between flare duration and flare class, however, their sample
sizes are skewed towards B and C classes; they hardly represent the higher
classes. Therefore, we studied a sample without extreme events in order to
determine the correlation between flare duration and flare type (confined and
eruptive). We examined $33$ flares with classes between M5 to X5 within
$45^{\circ}$ of the disk centres, using data from the Atmospheric Imaging
Assembly (AIA) and the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI). We find that the
linear correlation between flare class against flare duration by full width
half maximum (FWHM) in general is weak ($r=0.19$); however, confined flares
have a significant correlation ($r=0.58$) compared to eruptive types
($r=0.08$). Also, the confined M class flares' average duration is less than
half of the eruptive flares. Similarly, confined flares have a higher
correlation ($r=0.89$) than eruptive flares ($r=0.60$) between flare classes
against magnetic reconnection flux. In this work, a balanced sample size
between flare types is an important strategy for obtaining a reliable
quantitative comparison.
