College Students Study Far Less Than Those 20, 40 Years Ago
Here
Here
posted by Winston Smith at
11:18 AM
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
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9 Comments:
Alternative Headline:
College Students Lie On Surveys Far Less Than Those 20,40 Years Ago.
heh heh...
Or, frighteningly, perhaps even more...
I'm suspicious of the data. See p. 35 of the paper.
It seems too coincidental to me that the 1961-1981 baseline was built with the following features:
- the 1981 class time was used for 1961, which otherwise didn't exist
- the 1961 and 1981 data had a significantly differnt source, different sample sizes, and different age cohorts
It just seems odd that the one data set that took the most massaging is the one that's way out of line.
Maybe they've done the math to reach their conclusion correctly with some confidence, but my guess is that the real trend is much smaller than reported.
Another thing that raises my skepticism: Studies that don't label their graphs well. Maybe everyone else got this, but I didn't: The left bar for each time period is out-of-class study; the right bar in-class.
I can't fully quantify my own experience so many years ago. Memory is like that. I can estimate in-class time at between 15 and 20 hours per week (minimum 4 courses, normally each 3 hours per week of lecture and 1 hour or more of sections or labs). How this could have shrunk to 8 or 9 hours is something I leave to commenters with more recent experience.
BS
Having just graduated from Cornell (physics/math double major) I can attest that most semesters I had close to 15-20 hours of in lecture time. Most of the in-major classes had a ratio of atleast 2 or 3 between out-of-class and in-class work time.
This is true for almost all of my friends as well(mostly other physics/engineering types)
I would also comment my father (also a physics major in under grad) has said I worked far harder in undergrad that he did and he falls in the first data set
although, I belive the numbers on the buiness types
Maybe you're just an extremely inefficient worker. =)
Well, cornellian, such anecdotal evidence isn't very weighty...
Gotta think on LL's point some, though...
I graduated last spring with an Applied Arts and Sciences degree. Specifically, I'm a Radiologic Technologist. (I take x-rays.)
I probably had about 15-20 hours per week in class (including labs) as well. I also had an additional 16-24 hours a week in a hospital internship. (Except in the summer. Then I had no classes and 40 hours a week at the hospital.) And our instructors at the hospital gave us tests, research projects, and papers just like our classroom instructors did, although not as often.
I know this is just another anectdotal story, so it may be worth pointing out that anyone who is a Registered Technologist with the ARRT has to have taken the same (or very similar) courses and put in roughly the same amount of time as I did. I know that other degrees in the medical field (whether it's nursing, physical therapy, dental, whatever) have similar standards. I can't see how you could be majoring in these fields and get away with an 8-9 hours/week class schedual.
Thing is, there are lots of individual students who work a lot, and there are lots of majors that require lots of work.
The question, though--as you realize--is about the average student.
Like the cornellian, I'm pretty sure that the average business major doesn't have to work all that much, and doesn't do so. And business majors have exploded. It's virtually the default major these days.
Some anecdotal evidence in support of Winston's point:
I changed my major several times as an undergrad. When I was a "general studies" major and then a sociology major, I almost never studied, and the course readings I could fit between classes, (I really extremely fast) because the exams were based upon comprehension of the material, which for me didn't require any studying.
When I changed my major to biology, I was suddenly studying hours every evening, because the courses for the biology degree required memorization in addition to comprehension.
So I would say that in my experience a shift in the type of degrees students are getting would have a tremendous affect upon how much they were studying.
Like I said anecdotal evidence, but I did take a lot of classes as an undergrad.
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