How much do college students really study?

On most college or university campuses today you will here students griping about the amount of homework they receive and how much studying they will be doing that evening and how much free time they don’t have.

I decided to do my study on the amount of credit hours students take and compare that to how many hours a week they spend studying. Students complain often about how bad there grades are and somehow relate poor grades to poor teaching. It is not unlikely for a poor teacher to slip through the cracks in today’s education system, but more often than not it’s the students fault.

According to the book, Cornerstone: Building on Your Best, a student should roughly spend two hours of studying time to every semester credit hour they spend in class. So if you’re taking fifteen credit hours per/week, you should be spending roughly thirty hours per/week studying. Honestly, how many students today really spend this much time studying? The graphs show that at Iowa Lakes male students take roughly 16.7 credits per semester, with female students taking 17.3. Now if you would take a look at graph number two. Graph two shows the average hours per/week students spend studying according to the average amount of credits taken. Male students on average spend about 2.65 hours per/week studying, while females study on average 2.63 hours per/week.

The results show that students at Iowa Lakes spend an average 27.36 hours understudying. In a survey done by the National Survey of Student Engagement at Indiana University, they asked students at University of California Santa Cruz about their study habits. Their results show that, “only one in five undergraduates studies alone for more than 21 hours out-of-class per week. In fact, 43 percent of students who answered the survey said they spend 10 hours or fewer per week studying outside of class.” Although Iowa Lakes is a two-year junior college and UC Santa Cruz is a four-year program, the lower 43 percent of students studied at Santa Cruz can be compared to all of the Iowa Lakes students surveyed.

This study shows that students at Iowa Lakes are drastically below the average of hours spent per week studying based upon semester credit hours. However, this seems to be the norm for most colleges. I believe students at Iowa Lakes could do a better job and spend a bit more time on average studying per/week. Though, I also believe that the statistic that states students should spend two hours per week on every semester credit is a bit out of date.