How much do you study? Apparently not as much as the past.
According to a July 4 Boston Globe article, professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, looked at time-use surveys which analyzed how much the average student studies. It found that the average student studies for about 14 hours a week these days.
Taken by itself, that’s not such an alarming figure. It’s two hours a day, and really, do faculty and administration think college students study much on Fridays and Saturdays? So it’s really split over five days.
In addition, student studying is hardly a straight line with no increases or decreases over the course of a semester. Faculty and administration have to know that student studying has peaks and valleys, depending on when test-taking days are.
Yet 14 hours a week becomes an alarming figure when it gets compared to the past. Those idealistic 1964 college students studied for about 24 hours a week on average, 10 hours more than these days.
This figure affects all demographics and attendees of all schools, whether the schools have a particularly good academic reputation or not.
So essentially, all people are left with is a need for answers. Why are students today studying for two hours a day when 1964 students studied for about three-and-a-half hours a day?
The Boston Globe article ruled out a few of the easily guessed reasons.
The biggest drop in studying came before the advent of new technology. According to the Globe, study time fell from 24.4 hours per week to 16.8 hours per week between 1961 and 1981. So the drop does not seem to be because students are all on Facebook these days or even because students used unreliable typewriters to produce papers or confusing card catalogues at the library to find books.
So what’s the real reason? Perhaps the biggest clue is a look at how high school seniors are studying. According to data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, students did not even study six hours a week while a senior in high school by 2009.
But to us college students of this generation, is this really so surprising? All I have to rely on is my personal experience, but senior year at Soddy-Daisy High School was the easiest year if you were a model honor student on top of your studies. When I graduated, since I took a mathematics course in eighth grade, I did not even have to take a math course during senior year. And I only went to school all day in my last semester of high school because I elected to.
If high school seniors are having similar experiences to the ones I had, where some students only had one class during their last semester or even graduated high school a semester early, then it’s not surprising that study time would be so lax during the senior year of high school. (Granted, my high school was shifting from period schedule to block schedule, and that played a part in these happenings, but still, the point remains overall.)
And as anyone could probably guess, that’s not the best setup for entering college. It seems as if this lack of study time during the end of high school would be in direct correlation to a rough college transition. My worst report card in undergraduate education was, predictably, freshman year, fall semester.
And yet the National Survey for Student Engagement said in 2009, according to the same Globe article, that 62 percent of college students studied 15 hours or less and yet still came back with As and Bs. Is getting As and Bs on your report card having a rough transition? Of course not.
So really the problem is that the standards of college success have been lowered, and this does not fit in with idealistic expectations of what college should be — the old idea of studying for hours in the library and agonizing over doing well on the test. I would argue that this ideal still exists, but it is more centered around big tests and paper due dates than, say, a constant need to pull all-nighters.
Another big reason why students probably study less and another one that the Boston Globe article gives attention to is the advent of sites like Rate My Professor. Sites like these essentially shifted the power away from professors and toward college students. When professors have to start worrying about what their reputation is, they might shift toward being more popular and making assignments fewer and less complex.
Plus course evaluations give students the power to say whether professors are being “unfair,” and of course a student’s definition of “unfair” can vary and often depend upon who is the easiest professor in that field and how each other professor stacks up against the easiest class sections.
In response, the Globe said some universities are putting less weight on course evaluations when it comes to granting tenure, which is a right move.
However, there’s no real easy answer on this front because, to be fair, course sections should be roughly the same difficulty for the same course. For example, there should be no English 101 course section that is drastically more difficult than any other English 101 section.
More rigid guidelines and more distinct class assignments — like professors’ aptitude for assigning Blackboard written responses to readings than just having students read for class — can help put an end to some of these disparities in studying and studying expectations.
At the same time, we need to make our studying expectations a bit more realistic. When universities, like the ones mentioned in the Globe article, say that students should study two hours a week for each credit hour they have on their schedule, it becomes a bit ridiculous.
No student is studying a full 30 hours a week — on top of attending class 15 hours a week. Today’s students are engaged in student groups and have part-time jobs to take care of. There are simply not enough hours in a week to allot 45 hours a week to college. That might sound lazy, but it’s just common sense.

— Robby O’Daniel is a graduate student in communication and information. He can be reached at rodaniel@utk.edu.