<p>Five</a> colleges where students study - College, Inc. - The Washington Post</p>
<p>Is</a> college too easy? As study time falls, debate rises - The Washington Post</p>
<p>From what I heard, it heavily depends on the major. Kids in any kind of engineering major study a lot. Then of course some schools are harder than others. A friend’s son at CMU says he has no social life because he studies all the time</p>
<p>While it does depend on the major, my daughter (who really does study a lot and is a curve wrecker as a result) says that it seems that many of her classmates do not study enough and just hope that the teacher will curve the test.</p>
<p>I only have anecdotal evidence from one class - S said he had studied “way more than usual” for a particular test - and the number of hours was 3. H and I laughed and said what the?? In OUR day, we would study 8 hours or more for one test if we needed to - until we thought we knew everything within the realm of possibility for the teacher to test on. We would also admit S seems much “quicker” than we were at processing, storing and retrieving information. (Shh… don’t tell him he’s smarter than we are.) :)</p>
<p>I have to wonder about the NSSE data used in the top 5 listing. It doesn’t seem to gibe with colleges I would consider to require much studying.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why this article is trying to correlate prestige and “quality” of the student body, or even hard work with study time. “Studying” can mean a lot of things: alone at the library, intensely memorizing lecture notes; in group at the caf, recitating ochem formulas over frozen yogurt; lazily in front of TV, skimming over assigned reading; at work and unfocused, trying to come up with a paper outline in between two patrons; etc…
Anyway, across different universities, most majors have a set of competencies and knowledge that students graduating with a Bachelor in [X] should master. Saying that students at the named universities need more time than students a other universities to master the material (more study time), doesn’t speak highly of the school. In my opinion, it would suggest that students have to put in more hours to study because they are not getting the most of their lectures for some reason, or that the school does not really teach its freshmen how to work very efficiently, using less time to do more. An academically challenging and nurturing school does not necessarily mean a place where one has to spend more time studying. It can be a place where students (and maybe even students and faculty) engage together in great social, political, philosophical conversations on their free time, or where student get to participate in high-level research, or where there are intellectually challenging ECs to participate in, such as MUN, debate society, etc…, or where required study time isn’t so overwhelming that people can actually take the time to attend conferences, read journal articles, or go to office hours and talk about things relevant to their academic interests, and think about finer and more specialized aspects of their major, as opposed to having to study a lot of hours for general and major classes that everybody else takes. Wow, my writing get tremendously sloppier at the end of the semester.</p>
<p>The article points out some colleges where students reported the most study time per week in a survey- UW-Madison was first! Going to the most elite colleges doesn’t mean students there spend the most time studying (a parent could complain- “why aren’t you spending as much time studying as they do at UW?”). UW has made the top party schools list- but here they show students reporting more study hours than most other colleges. “Study hard, play hard” saying shown to be true with the addition of the academic survey added to the party reputation. </p>
<p>Take all surveys with your choice of size grain of salt. It was nice to see my alma mater quoted out of our region for something academically positive compared to other colleges.</p>
<p>Neither of my kids schools participated.
My oldest studied so much she wouldn’t take a magazine on the train going back to school after Christmas. My youngest studies at least five hours a day.
But like I said, neither school participated in the survey.
[FSSE</a> Home](<a href=“http://fsse.iub.edu/]FSSE”>http://fsse.iub.edu/)</p>
<p>My daughter studied way more than I did. OTOH she did science; I did literature. I read & wrote a heck of a lot more than she did.</p>
<p>If you read the other article linked, you’ll see that the Post asked schools in its immediate area and some refused to answer. </p>
<p>I just tried Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, Brown, Pomona, Notre Dame, Holy Cross. None participated.</p>
<p>Here’s the link to the entire list…at least if this works…</p>
<p><a href=“http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2011_Results/pdf/NSSE_2011_AnnualResults.pdf#page=44[/url]”>http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2011_Results/pdf/NSSE_2011_AnnualResults.pdf#page=44</a></p>
<p>It also looks as if some schools only participated in one of the surveys. Moreover, some of the schools don’t come up when you do a search but ARE on the list, e.g., Smith and Williams.</p>
<p>Since the factors the NSSE measures have been correlated highly with how much one learns in college, it is curious that almost all the highest-ranking colleges decline to participate (or publish their results if they do participate). If they are really delivering the superior educations that their anointments as “America’s best colleges” would imply, one would think they would leap at the chance to prove that they are worth their high cost. </p>
<p>But apparently not. I wonder why?</p>
<p>annasdad, it doesn’t have much to do with the “highest-ranking” colleges–it has to do with the fact that far fewer of the research institutions participate across the country. If you look at the list, the highest-ranking liberal arts colleges do participate, because they care about the undergraduate experience, which is what the survey is supposedly designed to benchmark. The RUs, not so much.</p>
<p>I think the “highest ranking” colleges feel like they don’t have anything to prove, so they don’t release the data. Anecdotally, I can say that Wellesley students study hard and typically have a very full academic workload. For instance, at Wellesley it wouldn’t be unusual for someone to put in at least a few hours of studying on a Friday afternoon/ evening.</p>
<p>Those unlisted schools are not in fact collecting this particular data. But looking at the survey questions, one can see why. The questions skew heavily in favor of LACs. The Washington Post article is looking at a very small slice of data, based on questions like how many books have you read and how many papers have you written this year, and how many problem sets have you done in a typical week. The self-reporting feature hardly leads to reliable data. I would suspect you’d get much harder data from polling the faculty about their course requirements.</p>
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<p>So, knowing that, why would anyone send their kids to RUs for undergraduate educations?</p>
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<p>That’s a very benign view. Another possibility is that if they did participate and release the data, it would prove that these emperors are running around buck-naked. I would not claim that is the case, of course, since I have no data - but neither is there a basis for categorically denying that it might be.</p>
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<p>And I’m sure there would be no self-interest involved.</p>
<p>In a study of course examination rigor at 40 research universities differing in undergraduate student body selectivity, “Selectivity had no significant relationship with the percentage of examination questions asked at the higher-order levels of comprehension, application, or critical thinking levels. This finding suggests that more selective research universities tend not to give any more rigorous examinations than less selective ones. To the extent that rigor in course examinations reflects similar rigor in the instruction received (an association that cannot be determined from the study), it may be that undergraduate selectivity alone is simply not a particularly effective way of identifying universities that have demanding academic programs.” [Pascarella and Terenzini, 79-80]</p>
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<p>Presumably wider course selections. But it would seem from some threads that it has to do with sports.</p>
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And I’m sure there would be no self-interest involved.[/unquote]</p>
<p>As a former faculty member, I don’t really see this. Faculty make up their syllabi before the beginning of term. What purpose could it possibly serve to alter their course requirements for the purposes of a “student engagement” survey? Admittedly, plenty of administrators and legislators are trying to impose metrics on faculty members in really horrific ways, but the scenario you propose seems highly unlikely to me.</p>
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<p>So wider course selection, but less learned from each course selected? It wouldn’t surprise me if that wouldn’t bother some people - after all, it’s the piece of paper you get at the end of the four years, not how much you’ve learned in the four years, right?</p>
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<p>Perhaps none - but what they report might or might not bear a resemblance to what they actually require.</p>
<p>I would think to get an accurate assessment, you’d need to have access to the students’ final exams (or final papers, or whatever) - with grades attached.</p>
<p>A list supposedly about rigor & Reed isn’t on it?
Guess they don’t care enough.
[url=<a href=“Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - November/December 2011”>Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - November/December 2011 - Students Review]Imagine</a> Magazine - Johns Hopkins - November/December 2011 - Students Review<a href=“UChicago%20isn’t%20on%20it%20either”>/url</a>
;)</p>
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<p>Several reasons:</p>
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<li> Student wants a wider selection of subjects and courses, or a particular major subject that is more readily available at RUs than LACs.</li>
<li> Student is advanced and wants a deeper selection of courses, including graduate level courses, in his/her major subject. Such a student may skip some of the huge lower division introductory courses anyway.</li>
<li> Admission and financial aid results leave only RUs as suitable four year college choices in April. The bigness of most RUs and smallness of LACs means that LACs can only serve a small percentage of the total number of four year college students. LAC fans should be glad that more people don’t apply to LACs, because if LACs became popular, they would be much more selective and expensive.</li>
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<p>That Post study is useless. </p>
<p>As others have mentioned, “study time” will vary widely according to multiple categories not exclusive to major, curriculum, competitiveness of the student body, difficulty of the professors. Computerization has evidently made many time-intensive tasks involved with studying supremely efficient. A student studying linear algebra will have a much different time of it than another student studying less conceptually demanding topics.</p>
<p>The article also re-insinuates the false notion of “grade inflation” which some third tier schools like St. Anselm’s credit for lower grades achieved by their student body. Because it could never be lesser capability or motivation, ever.</p>