Part 2
All About Academics
Study Time Matters
By Vicki Nelson
New college students want to do well, but they don’t always know what’s required to do well. Finding and spending quality study time is one of the most important skills to master, but it's not as simple as it sounds. If a student is struggling in class, one of the first questions I ask is, “How much time do you spend studying?” Very often, a student’s answer doesn’t match the expectation that most professors have. There’s a disconnect about “how much is enough.” Most college classes meet for a number of “credit hours” — typically 3 or 4. The general rule is that students should spend two or three hours on outside-of-class work for each credit hour or hour spent in the classroom. Therefore, a student taking five 3-credit classes spends 15 hours each week in class and should be spending 30 hours on work outside of class. When we talk about this, I can see on students’ faces that for most of them this isn’t even close to their reality. According to one survey, most college students spend 10–13 hours a week studying — less than half of what’s expected.
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Why Such a Disconnect? College is very different from high school, but the total time committed to academics is more similar than you might think. Let’s crunch some more numbers. Most high school students spend six hours a day or 30 hours a week in school. That adds up to about 1,080 hours in school a year. On average they spend four to five hours a week on homework, or 180 hours a year. That puts the average time spent on class and homework combined at 1,260 hours per school year. Now let’s look at college: Most semesters are 15 weeks long. That student with 15 credits (five classes) spends 225 hours in class and, with the formula above, should be spending 450 hours studying. That’s 675 hours a semester or 1,350 for the year. That’s more than the 1,260 in high school, but only 90 hours, or an average of three hours more a week. Fall 2022
