5 ms·

College students should study more

26 points by vwoolf 2y ago

damnesian 2y ago
How on earth could a college student enrolled full-time only have 1.2 hours of in-class instruction per day? Back in my day, when we had a foot of snow on the ground and had to walk barefoot uphill in every direction, a 15-credit-hour semester amounted to 3 hour-long courses on MWF and 2 hour and a half courses Tu and Th. Even subtracting 10 minutes for time between classes, it comes to 2.83 hours per day, using a real-world example- my own freshman year. Am I splitting hairs, or does this seem wrong to anyone else?
- arethuza 2y ago
  When I did a CS degree in the 1980s at a UK university I think we had at least 4 hours of lectures per day - with lab hours and tutorials on top of that (maybe a couple of hours a day). We thought we had it easy - the Electrical Engineering students we shared a lot of classes with had 8 hours a day in their timetables. Edit: By fourth year I was practically living in the department building - easily averaging ~10 hours there then going to the pub or for a run...
  - quenix 2y ago
    I'm currently studying Electrical Engineering at a Russell Group UK uni. My timetable is nothing like what you are describing, so I think things have changed. I have about 3-4 hours of lecture time per week and 3-4 hours of tutorial time with professors. That amounts to 8 hours per week. A lot of it seems to have shifted to "self-directed learning" time, i.e. studying, doing labs, etc independently.
    - arethuza 2y ago
      You're not going to like this: that degree cost me nothing financially - I didn't pay any fees and I got a full grant which was more than enough to live on and have a nice flat in central Edinburgh. Edit: Turns out this was a pretty good investment by the taxpayers of the UK...
      - quenix 2y ago
        University of Edinburgh? That happens to be where I'm studying right now. It's £28,950/year for EU students.
        arethuza 2y ago
        No - I went to the far less prestigious Heriot-Watt (although I was accepted by Edinburgh!) which at the time I was there had the distinct advantage of having the relevant departments located in the Grassmarket. Fees for Scottish universities still free for students from Scotland though? I'm just bitter because my own son decided to go to an English Russel Group University...
  - tgv 2y ago
    My first year was 36 "hours" (an hour was 50 minutes, followed by a break of at least 10 minutes) per week, which included lab/terminal time. Homework was, as the word says, not included, but some classes mixed classical teaching, explanation, and exercises. The number of hours in class steadily dropped over the next years, as the homework load increased to 40+ hours for writing what's nowadays called the MSc. thesis.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I don't remember the exact numbers but undergrad would, I think, be at least 3 hours of classroom a day.
- vel0city 2y ago
  Maybe remote/online classes are getting to be a lot more popular post-COVID?
  - dotnet00 2y ago
    In the US there seem to be a lot of requirements forced upon universities that limit how much instruction is allowed to be exclusively remote or online for a student to still be considered full time (by visa requirements for international students, and I think by student loan requirements for local students). IIRC only 3-4 credits of ~15 are allowed to be an online/hybrid course. Although courses which have in-person spaces, but allow remote viewing (no interaction) are fairly common.
- asgfaidofio 2y ago
  It's obviously wrong, and by a lot. At every university I know of, a full-time courseload is defined as at least 12 hours in class per week, or 2.4 hours per weekday. The average student doesn't cut half their classes.
- dotnet00 2y ago
  A 15 credit semester for me, having been through undergrad within the decade, typically meant 1-2 courses with 1.5 hour lectures 3 days a week, a 3 hour lab or lecture once a week, and another 1-2 courses with a 1.5 or so hours of lecture twice a week. So yeah, 1.2 seems like a wild underestimate. Unless maybe non-STEM programs are less rigorous? Since I was in the engineering department, a large chunk of my general education requirements were waived as there were simply too many requirements to cover (so, eg, no second language class and most others needing only one class in each category, setup so single classes could fulfill multiple categories). Eg if you're an art student, maybe large amounts of classroom instruction isn't as important as large amounts of time to work on projects and then get feedback during class time? The one art class I took (and instantly dropped) seemed to be like that. The hour long lectures were just about analyzing and discussing a piece each week, and instead there was a lot of work to be done on writing about the work and going to museums to perform studies (which is why I dropped it, as much as I enjoy museums, I prefer to enjoy them without worrying about grades).
- oersted 2y ago
  I don’t understand this, we had 5h of classes a day in CS for 4 years in Spain, it’s still like that, and it was not particularly strenuous. There was plenty of time left to start my first company and a reasonable amount of leisure time, while maintaining top grades. I have been in a number of other prestigious universities across EU after that, the actual instruction quality and difficulty was not any lesser in Spain. How do they even learn anything with 1.2h? EDIT: sure including the weekend that’s 3.6h per day, still is 3x.
- astura 2y ago
  It's very wrong, when I was in college full time was 4-8 hours of class every day M-Th. Beyond that assignments outside of classroom instruction were usually around 2 hours of work per hour of instruction, and MUCH more for non-entry level CS and SE classes. Spending less than 3 hours a day for a full time student is legitimately insane.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Perhaps by counting non-class days such as weekends, vacation and exam days? A semester at my school was 62 instruction days, so 3 * (62 / (365/3)) is about 1.5.
- burningChrome 2y ago
  Its off by a massive margin. I was in architecture. My roommate was a bio-chem major. Besides a full day of classes, I spent several hours a day in studio doing projects and my roommate spent several hours toiling away in the school lab. All told, I lived in a house with several soccer teammates and we were all logging tons of time outside our normal classes in labs, studios, and elsewhere that were considered part of our normal class time which effectively extended the time professors expected you to be working on their stuff. Our weeks were just crammed hour to hour with homework, practices and games and trying to fit in 25-30 hours of part-time work a week to boot. College was a blast, but it's not for the feint of heart or slacker.
  - filoleg 2y ago
    Yeah, had a similar experience with my undergrad in CS. The expectaton at the college I went to was that each credit hour roughly maps to 1 hour of lecture + 3 hrs of work outside of class. That estimate wasn’t even for getting an A, that was just to pass a class with a C. Which sounds like a lot, and it was, but you gotta account that this would include weekends as well (thus leaving some amount of free time, because otherwise it would require pulling 16 hour weekdays). It definitely builds character, and I absolutely would do it the exact same way if I had to go back in time. However, I wouldn’t recommend my school to anyone who wants to do premed, because your GPA will needlessly suffer, and GPA is one of the primary importance metrics for med school acceptance.
chrsw 2y ago
I wonder how much time is left over in a 24 hour period after you get your daily recommended sleep, study and exercise. On to of the required work and class time.
- Nevin1901 2y ago
  Not a lot. I do exactly this and I'm only left with a few hours per day to do whatever I want. I could obviously sleep less/eat out but that's not worth it imo.
- water-your-self 2y ago
  The graph in the article is woefully different from my own experience
  - Jensson 2y ago
    Social science students study way less than STEM, and the remaining subjects even less than social science. Also students at easier to get into colleges study less than at more prestigious ones. So likely your experience wasn't very representative, unless you studied something normal at an average university instead of STEM at a higher end one.
    - stephenhuey 2y ago
      Yeah, I was trying to make sense of the graph in the article, because even if I were carrying only 3 STEM classes per semester (sometimes it was more), then class plus at least 1 lab would come out to 10 hours per week, but these classes typically had problem sets we spent 4-5 hours on each week, so that's almost 25 hours per week before we count the other 2 classes I didn't mention, or study for exams. And if it was programming, most would have similar workloads, but some were notorious, so a single graphics or operating systems class might demand 15-20 hours of programming outside of class time the entire semester!
    - dllthomas 2y ago
      I think you're correct that experience will differ substantially by context. I think your particular generalizations might hold enough to show up in a regression but there's enough other stuff going on (and noise) that they won't be tremendously predictive in individual cases. I was a STEM major, did well at a reasonable school, and the only time I felt like I had way the hell more homework than I could get through was at a community college when I signed up for a Literature course and a Political Science course the same summer.
hardwaregeek 2y ago
The problem here is the sheer cost of college. Since college is so damn expensive, it creates a lot of risk aversion. You can't flunk a student or take away their scholarship because they'll end up with a lifetime's worth of debt without any degree. That's potentially life ruining. College as a whole is way more risky. The baby boomer idea of using college to explore one's passions becomes untenable when a single year costs 80k. The paradox here is that while college is extremely expensive, it's also still very much a gateway to white collar, middle class life. So you end up with a lot of students who are forced into college by their parents, who don't really want to be there, and who need decent grades. So yeah, they're not going to study that hard. To avoid this, we need cheaper college, and more routes into the middle class that don't involve college.
- glitchc 2y ago
  The problem isn't the cost of college, it's the chronic underpayment of a proper wage post graduation. College costs accurately reflect the impact of inflation. It's wages that are depressed. We can thank our corporate masters for that.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    Inflation is a different rate for each person really, but you can group it. The rate for the middle class, spending on things with semi-fixed supply like a desirable house or college, is higher than for lower class. The rate for upper class is the highest. Probably has to do with each one's asset mix (or lack thereof). The only thing shared between them all is our US Dollar which tends to double in supply each decade.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  Demand for college has sharply increased, and I don't think we've seen supply meet it yet. That can solve itself, and there are also trade schools.
  - f1yght 2y ago
    Why do people drag out trade schools? Sure they can make sense financially, but there's a heavy toll of working with your body instead of sitting in an office chair for work. And the numbers don't lie, college graduates make significantly more than non college grads. You might have loans, but your career trajectory can be much higher with a degree.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
feedforward 2y ago
As the chart shows, the real spike in grade inflation is when the US government effectively used GPA as a measure for whether or not young men were sent off to patrol villages next to rice paddies in Vietnam.
- Clubber 2y ago
  Also, if you attended college, you got a draft deferment. There were quite a few Ph.Ds awarded in that period. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23300/report/u-s-doctorate-awards https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23300/report/u-s-doctorate-awa...
asgfaidofio 2y ago
This doesn't make any sense. A full-time student spends at least 2.4 hours in class per day by definition. Most universities consider a student full-time if they take more than 12 credit-hours per semester, and a credit-hour is one hour of in-class instruction per week. That works out to 2.4 hours per weekday. In practice most students take 15 credit-hours, which means they spend three hours in class per day. The chart is from The Heritage Foundation, so it's a lie but I assume not fabricated from whole cloth. Did they count weekends and holidays in the denominator, perhaps?
- hot_gril 2y ago
  Weekends probably count.
  - asgfaidofio 2y ago
    It doesn't add up. 12/7 ≈ 1.7 > 1.2 Also, counting weekends would be dishonest without pointing it out. A full-time job is eight hours per day, not 5.7.
UncleEntity 2y ago
The problem with this argument is you have slackers like me who specifically chose my major because it was something I was good at so had to put in minimal effort to get passing grades. The last college essay I had to write I started at the beginning of class, walked it to campus before the class was over and got an A. And, as they say, D's get degrees.
photochemsyn 2y ago
For difficult coursework where you really need to learn the material inside and out in order to have any chance of success in the next course in the series, the lecture:study ratio needed is about 1:3. If one is taking three such courses, perhaps ten hours in lecture per week, then around four hours a day, seven days a week will be needed for study. (It's true that some people grasp material quicker than others, but often that's because they've had some prior introduction to it.) This is pretty demanding and it's why a lot of people switch their majors to something less time-consuming. However, this lecture:study/practice ratio is entirely normal for vocational programs, e.g. learning to weld, etc. "If I hold up one corner of a square and the student cannot workout the other three for himself, I won't go any further." - Confucius

26 points by vwoolf 2y ago

How on earth could a college student enrolled full-time only have 1.2 hours of in-class instruction per day? Back in my day, when we had a foot of snow on the ground and had to walk barefoot uphill in every direction, a 15-credit-hour semester amounted to 3 hour-long courses on MWF and 2 hour and a half courses Tu and Th. Even subtracting 10 minutes for time between classes, it comes to 2.83 hours per day, using a real-world example- my own freshman year. Am I splitting hairs, or does this seem wrong to anyone else?

arethuza 2y ago
When I did a CS degree in the 1980s at a UK university I think we had at least 4 hours of lectures per day - with lab hours and tutorials on top of that (maybe a couple of hours a day). We thought we had it easy - the Electrical Engineering students we shared a lot of classes with had 8 hours a day in their timetables. Edit: By fourth year I was practically living in the department building - easily averaging ~10 hours there then going to the pub or for a run...
- quenix 2y ago
  I'm currently studying Electrical Engineering at a Russell Group UK uni. My timetable is nothing like what you are describing, so I think things have changed. I have about 3-4 hours of lecture time per week and 3-4 hours of tutorial time with professors. That amounts to 8 hours per week. A lot of it seems to have shifted to "self-directed learning" time, i.e. studying, doing labs, etc independently.
  - arethuza 2y ago
    You're not going to like this: that degree cost me nothing financially - I didn't pay any fees and I got a full grant which was more than enough to live on and have a nice flat in central Edinburgh. Edit: Turns out this was a pretty good investment by the taxpayers of the UK...
    - quenix 2y ago
      University of Edinburgh? That happens to be where I'm studying right now. It's £28,950/year for EU students.
      - arethuza 2y ago
        No - I went to the far less prestigious Heriot-Watt (although I was accepted by Edinburgh!) which at the time I was there had the distinct advantage of having the relevant departments located in the Grassmarket. Fees for Scottish universities still free for students from Scotland though? I'm just bitter because my own son decided to go to an English Russel Group University...
- tgv 2y ago
  My first year was 36 "hours" (an hour was 50 minutes, followed by a break of at least 10 minutes) per week, which included lab/terminal time. Homework was, as the word says, not included, but some classes mixed classical teaching, explanation, and exercises. The number of hours in class steadily dropped over the next years, as the homework load increased to 40+ hours for writing what's nowadays called the MSc. thesis.
ghaff 2y ago
I don't remember the exact numbers but undergrad would, I think, be at least 3 hours of classroom a day.
vel0city 2y ago
Maybe remote/online classes are getting to be a lot more popular post-COVID?
- dotnet00 2y ago
  In the US there seem to be a lot of requirements forced upon universities that limit how much instruction is allowed to be exclusively remote or online for a student to still be considered full time (by visa requirements for international students, and I think by student loan requirements for local students). IIRC only 3-4 credits of ~15 are allowed to be an online/hybrid course. Although courses which have in-person spaces, but allow remote viewing (no interaction) are fairly common.
asgfaidofio 2y ago
It's obviously wrong, and by a lot. At every university I know of, a full-time courseload is defined as at least 12 hours in class per week, or 2.4 hours per weekday. The average student doesn't cut half their classes.
dotnet00 2y ago
A 15 credit semester for me, having been through undergrad within the decade, typically meant 1-2 courses with 1.5 hour lectures 3 days a week, a 3 hour lab or lecture once a week, and another 1-2 courses with a 1.5 or so hours of lecture twice a week. So yeah, 1.2 seems like a wild underestimate. Unless maybe non-STEM programs are less rigorous? Since I was in the engineering department, a large chunk of my general education requirements were waived as there were simply too many requirements to cover (so, eg, no second language class and most others needing only one class in each category, setup so single classes could fulfill multiple categories). Eg if you're an art student, maybe large amounts of classroom instruction isn't as important as large amounts of time to work on projects and then get feedback during class time? The one art class I took (and instantly dropped) seemed to be like that. The hour long lectures were just about analyzing and discussing a piece each week, and instead there was a lot of work to be done on writing about the work and going to museums to perform studies (which is why I dropped it, as much as I enjoy museums, I prefer to enjoy them without worrying about grades).
oersted 2y ago
I don’t understand this, we had 5h of classes a day in CS for 4 years in Spain, it’s still like that, and it was not particularly strenuous. There was plenty of time left to start my first company and a reasonable amount of leisure time, while maintaining top grades. I have been in a number of other prestigious universities across EU after that, the actual instruction quality and difficulty was not any lesser in Spain. How do they even learn anything with 1.2h? EDIT: sure including the weekend that’s 3.6h per day, still is 3x.
astura 2y ago
It's very wrong, when I was in college full time was 4-8 hours of class every day M-Th. Beyond that assignments outside of classroom instruction were usually around 2 hours of work per hour of instruction, and MUCH more for non-entry level CS and SE classes. Spending less than 3 hours a day for a full time student is legitimately insane.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
Perhaps by counting non-class days such as weekends, vacation and exam days? A semester at my school was 62 instruction days, so 3 * (62 / (365/3)) is about 1.5.
burningChrome 2y ago
Its off by a massive margin. I was in architecture. My roommate was a bio-chem major. Besides a full day of classes, I spent several hours a day in studio doing projects and my roommate spent several hours toiling away in the school lab. All told, I lived in a house with several soccer teammates and we were all logging tons of time outside our normal classes in labs, studios, and elsewhere that were considered part of our normal class time which effectively extended the time professors expected you to be working on their stuff. Our weeks were just crammed hour to hour with homework, practices and games and trying to fit in 25-30 hours of part-time work a week to boot. College was a blast, but it's not for the feint of heart or slacker.
- filoleg 2y ago
  Yeah, had a similar experience with my undergrad in CS. The expectaton at the college I went to was that each credit hour roughly maps to 1 hour of lecture + 3 hrs of work outside of class. That estimate wasn’t even for getting an A, that was just to pass a class with a C. Which sounds like a lot, and it was, but you gotta account that this would include weekends as well (thus leaving some amount of free time, because otherwise it would require pulling 16 hour weekdays). It definitely builds character, and I absolutely would do it the exact same way if I had to go back in time. However, I wouldn’t recommend my school to anyone who wants to do premed, because your GPA will needlessly suffer, and GPA is one of the primary importance metrics for med school acceptance.

chrsw 2y ago

I wonder how much time is left over in a 24 hour period after you get your daily recommended sleep, study and exercise. On to of the required work and class time.

Nevin1901 2y ago
Not a lot. I do exactly this and I'm only left with a few hours per day to do whatever I want. I could obviously sleep less/eat out but that's not worth it imo.
water-your-self 2y ago
The graph in the article is woefully different from my own experience
- Jensson 2y ago
  Social science students study way less than STEM, and the remaining subjects even less than social science. Also students at easier to get into colleges study less than at more prestigious ones. So likely your experience wasn't very representative, unless you studied something normal at an average university instead of STEM at a higher end one.
  - stephenhuey 2y ago
    Yeah, I was trying to make sense of the graph in the article, because even if I were carrying only 3 STEM classes per semester (sometimes it was more), then class plus at least 1 lab would come out to 10 hours per week, but these classes typically had problem sets we spent 4-5 hours on each week, so that's almost 25 hours per week before we count the other 2 classes I didn't mention, or study for exams. And if it was programming, most would have similar workloads, but some were notorious, so a single graphics or operating systems class might demand 15-20 hours of programming outside of class time the entire semester!
  - dllthomas 2y ago
    I think you're correct that experience will differ substantially by context. I think your particular generalizations might hold enough to show up in a regression but there's enough other stuff going on (and noise) that they won't be tremendously predictive in individual cases. I was a STEM major, did well at a reasonable school, and the only time I felt like I had way the hell more homework than I could get through was at a community college when I signed up for a Literature course and a Political Science course the same summer.

hardwaregeek 2y ago

The problem here is the sheer cost of college. Since college is so damn expensive, it creates a lot of risk aversion. You can't flunk a student or take away their scholarship because they'll end up with a lifetime's worth of debt without any degree. That's potentially life ruining. College as a whole is way more risky. The baby boomer idea of using college to explore one's passions becomes untenable when a single year costs 80k. The paradox here is that while college is extremely expensive, it's also still very much a gateway to white collar, middle class life. So you end up with a lot of students who are forced into college by their parents, who don't really want to be there, and who need decent grades. So yeah, they're not going to study that hard. To avoid this, we need cheaper college, and more routes into the middle class that don't involve college.

glitchc 2y ago
The problem isn't the cost of college, it's the chronic underpayment of a proper wage post graduation. College costs accurately reflect the impact of inflation. It's wages that are depressed. We can thank our corporate masters for that.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  Inflation is a different rate for each person really, but you can group it. The rate for the middle class, spending on things with semi-fixed supply like a desirable house or college, is higher than for lower class. The rate for upper class is the highest. Probably has to do with each one's asset mix (or lack thereof). The only thing shared between them all is our US Dollar which tends to double in supply each decade.
hot_gril 2y ago
Demand for college has sharply increased, and I don't think we've seen supply meet it yet. That can solve itself, and there are also trade schools.
- f1yght 2y ago
  Why do people drag out trade schools? Sure they can make sense financially, but there's a heavy toll of working with your body instead of sitting in an office chair for work. And the numbers don't lie, college graduates make significantly more than non college grads. You might have loans, but your career trajectory can be much higher with a degree.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

feedforward 2y ago

As the chart shows, the real spike in grade inflation is when the US government effectively used GPA as a measure for whether or not young men were sent off to patrol villages next to rice paddies in Vietnam.

Clubber 2y ago
Also, if you attended college, you got a draft deferment. There were quite a few Ph.Ds awarded in that period. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23300/report/u-s-doctorate-awards https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23300/report/u-s-doctorate-awa...

asgfaidofio 2y ago

This doesn't make any sense. A full-time student spends at least 2.4 hours in class per day by definition. Most universities consider a student full-time if they take more than 12 credit-hours per semester, and a credit-hour is one hour of in-class instruction per week. That works out to 2.4 hours per weekday. In practice most students take 15 credit-hours, which means they spend three hours in class per day. The chart is from The Heritage Foundation, so it's a lie but I assume not fabricated from whole cloth. Did they count weekends and holidays in the denominator, perhaps?

hot_gril 2y ago
Weekends probably count.
- asgfaidofio 2y ago
  It doesn't add up. 12/7 ≈ 1.7 > 1.2 Also, counting weekends would be dishonest without pointing it out. A full-time job is eight hours per day, not 5.7.

UncleEntity 2y ago

The problem with this argument is you have slackers like me who specifically chose my major because it was something I was good at so had to put in minimal effort to get passing grades. The last college essay I had to write I started at the beginning of class, walked it to campus before the class was over and got an A. And, as they say, D's get degrees.

photochemsyn 2y ago

For difficult coursework where you really need to learn the material inside and out in order to have any chance of success in the next course in the series, the lecture:study ratio needed is about 1:3. If one is taking three such courses, perhaps ten hours in lecture per week, then around four hours a day, seven days a week will be needed for study. (It's true that some people grasp material quicker than others, but often that's because they've had some prior introduction to it.) This is pretty demanding and it's why a lot of people switch their majors to something less time-consuming. However, this lecture:study/practice ratio is entirely normal for vocational programs, e.g. learning to weld, etc. "If I hold up one corner of a square and the student cannot workout the other three for himself, I won't go any further." - Confucius