Students Study Less Today than Ever Before

We’ve all heard that awful statistic that for every hour you are in class you should be studying two hours. So, if you are taking 15 hours, you should be studying 30 hours outside of the classroom. Yeah, right….
When I first got to college, I tried to make myself study the 34 hours my schedule “required.” It just wasn’t possible. Not because I was slacking off or spending too much time on Facebook, but because there just wasn’t enough work to do.
Philip Babcock, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, a professor at the University of California Riverside, conducted a survey of students’ study habits. They found that “the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours.”
Babcock and Marks do not attribute this decrease in study time to the use of social media sites, but to a mutual desire of both students and professors to do the least amount of work possible. Professors do not want to grade 30, 15-page papers, so they do not make this assignment. Students obviously do not want to write these papers, so nobody complains about the lack of homework.
Personally, I would have to believe this argument. When I talk to my mother about her experience in college, she seemed to have a lot more homework than I do. Are we all really just becoming such lazy people that we aren’t willing to do more than two hours of homework each day? If this is true, I am afraid the real world will be quite a wake up call for most of us when we graduate college.
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Via The Huffington Post