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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

Homework by Major

Stephen’s post last week about reading complained that students don’t want any more homework, and their disposition certainly shows up in the surveys. In the 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, almost one in five college seniors devoted five hours or less per week to “preparing for class,” and 26 percent stood at six to ten hours per week. College professors say that achievement requires around 25 hours per week of homework, but only 11 percent reached that mark.

The 2007 NSSE numbers break responses down by major, and the homework levels for seniors are worth comparing. Here are numbers for 15 hours or less.

Arts and humanities majors came in at 16 percent doing one to five hours of homework per week, 25 percent at six to 10 hours, and 20 percent at 11 to 15 hours.

Biological sciences: 12 percent do one to five hours, 22 percent do six to 10, and 20 percent do 11 to 15 hours.

Business: 23 percent at one to five, 30 percent at six to 10, and 19 percent at 11-15 hours.

Education: 16 percent at one to five, 27 percent at six to 10, and 21 percent at 11 to 15 hours.

Engineering: 10 percent at one to five, 19 percent at six to 10, and 17 percent at 11 to 15 hours.

Physical Science: 12 percent at one to five hours, 21 percent at six to 10, and 18 percent at 11-15 hours.

Social Science: 20 percent at one to five hours, 28 percent at six to 10, and 20 percent at 11-15 hours.

NSSE includes the total number of respondents for each major, and it is generally true that the more popular the major, the less homework students do.

Posted at 12:57:54 AM on May 5, 2008 | All postings by Mark Bauerlein

Comments

  1. This is interesting, because one of the questions I always ask my students on the evaluations of my class is how much time they put into reading or writing for class. The answer is usually 6-8 hours a week—just for my class. I wonder if “preparing for class” includes working on projects and papers, or if it only covers daily/weekly sorts of assignments.

    — PRT · May 5, 07:44 AM · #

  2. The big variation seems to be in the percentage who do not do 1-15 hours a week — it makes a difference if that means 0, or 25.

    — Mr Punch · May 5, 08:25 AM · #

  3. nearly 20% do 11-15 hours a week in all fields. doesn’t seem to be much discrepancy among the likely “A” students.

    — ROM · May 5, 09:00 AM · #

  4. To #1, the prompt in the survey covers all kinds of work “Preparing for class.”

    To #2, there were not enough zero-hour responses to reach 1 percent.

    — Mark Bauerlein · May 5, 09:17 AM · #

  5. I would be amazed if any student these days can calculate how much time he/she spends studying. Most do not study alone or in private and therefore underestimate how much time they spend socializing while “studying”, they do not study in concentrated periods of time – they answer the phone, change music, respond to IMs and TMs. It all adds up to less studying and less focus.

    The average weekly study in high school is 6 hours a week. They are not getting much practice before coming to college.

    On one hand, I am shocked at the sciences being so low. Just one problem set in organic chemistry can take 4 hours to complete or working through a few problems in biochemistry can take forever. On the other hand, I am not surprised. In a class of 40, maybe 8-10 do all the homework. The rest look at the problem set, scribble down a little nonsense and then wait for the answer key to be posted at which point they madly write all the solutions down. I am never surprised when the average Organic chemistry exam grade is 57 and there are only 4 students who score 85 or above. And then the students report that the course is SO hard!

    Yes, they forget that their full-time job when in college is supposed to be learning.

    — DrFunZ · May 5, 11:54 AM · #

  6. In my first semester of college I studied approximately 15 hours a week and got a C+ average. Then I straightened out. In order to do A work in all classes I had to study at least 40 hours a week, sometimes more. We routinely studied all day Saturday and all day Sunday. Students who now hold jobs while in college are often passing, but they are getting 1/2 to 1/4 of the education we got. The credential is everything, even if it has been significantly degraded in value. My courses are considered arduous by my (26-30 ACT-earning) students; in general they require approximately 1/3 the work required by the cognate courses which I took. Doctoral students in my humanities field are now tested on approximately 150 books in a 2-3 hour oral. We were tested on approximately 600 books in 4 4-hour writtens, plus a 3-hour oral (and our programs were significantly less demanding than those required of my own professors in the 1950’s). We are all complicit in this situation. Deans of students and vice presidents for enrollment management would be apoplectic if we required an amount of work commensurate with the difficulty of the material. We would be charged with limiting ‘access’ but access to what? A watered-down experience and a diploma not worth the paper it’s printed on? Colleagues with whom I can speak confidentially estimate that approximately 10-15% of our students should actually be in college. My experience at a USNews top 25 private university was not significantly different from my experience at 3 AAU public universities. In any class of 30 or so students there are approximately 4 who are doing work at the level of dean’s list students from my college days at a USNews top 25 private university.

    — Observer · May 5, 02:56 PM · #

  7. On Comment 6:

    This may seem like an “access” vs. “accountability” dichotomy but actually the two are not incompatible.

    When enrollment managers worry about honest grades limiting “access”, they mean fears about loss of “tuition and enrollment-related income” from a large incoming “freshman class”.

    However, if higher ed builds it, they (the students) will come and, increasingly, on higher ed’s terms.

    But unfortunately, higher education administrations, in their personal greed and obsession with construction for expansion’s sake, are tearing down the very edifice of education itself.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 5, 08:11 PM · #

  8. Research for decades has shown that four careers go on in college (one way to categorize it): self development, intellect development, social development, and career development. The only one that correlates consistently with better lifetime happiness and career success outcomes is self development. Intellect development correlates well only with grades in grad schools. Unfortunately it is always those most in need of self development who most avoid it. Unfortunately professors and parents emphasize intellect development though it does not correlate well with any good outcomes other than grades in grad schools.

    Homework can further self development but it usually does not. It most usually furthers intellect development—making it irrelevant for all but grad school grading.

    Individual homework assignments or assigments across all weeks of one course that are balanced among intellect, self, social, and career development are rare but found. The courses where this is found tend to be on particular topics encompassing all four perspectives, as is obvious to us all.

    To be honest—we, the professoriate, our masters (owners and obnoxious “MBA style managers of higher education functions and institutions”, parents, students and the customers of our student outputs—all of we stakeholders—are more than a bit fuzzy about what college does and is supposed to do and none of us has a definition of educated person that anybody else would agree with. Until higher education researches solidly using valid social science methods what educatedness is and how it gets produced in lives and what difference it makes in lives—we are all just spinning wheels, grinding axes, polishing donuts.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · May 6, 05:45 AM · #

  9. Gee, Richard, I’m glad the social sciences know exactly what educatedness (?) means. Knock yourselves out while I go and polish my donut (?). And find your closing parenthesis()).

    — Owen · May 6, 07:31 AM · #

  10. Mr. Punch is correct – it would be nice if the percentages added up to 100%. How much time are the other students spending?

    — Stephen · May 6, 09:11 AM · #

  11. Confucius said, in The Great Learning, the purpose of education is to develop one’s ethics in order to improve society. Students’ enthusiasm to coursework is proportional to the social importance that they perceive and understand. This is why students intuitively spend more time on Facebook than doing homework. This shows that the students are thinking correctly. If the students understand the importance of their coursework in improve society, the weights would shift. Who is responsible to draw the connection between coursework and society?

    — Edgar · May 6, 10:23 AM · #

  12. #11, Your argument hinges on whether or not Confucius should be our guide to education. If improving society is our be all and end all, the largest major would be public policy rather than psychology or biology and no one would study mathematics or archaeology. Certainly there is the possibility of improving society through the use of the latter, but the connections are less clear than with other areas of study. Many students exhibit passion for subjects that are less ‘improving’ than others. One of the principal problems with the humanities has been the desire to utilize certain areas of study to ‘improve’ society rather than, e.g., to preserve our cultural heritage, understand and appreciate art or understand our world. Improving society is fine, but when that becomes the direct, summum bonum one risks perverting disciplines to serve social/political/ideological purposes. IMHO, the most qualified improvers of society are those who are deeply grounded and broadly educated, so that they can bring expertise and insight to bear on seemingly intractable problems. Educating for direct ‘improvement’ generates a group of earnest individuals whose knowledge and skill do not equal their desire. We should encourage our students to pursue their own, seemingly quirky interests, for their passionate labors can ultimately lead to great insight. Richard Feynman was fascinated by numbers, E. O. Wilson by ants.

    — Observer · May 6, 10:45 AM · #

  13. To the Observer: this student affairs professional would love to have you assign the appropriate level of work you deem necessary for your students to master the subject. On my end, too many students end up in the party scene becuse they are carying GPAs close to Dean’s List without putting in much effort outside the classroom. When you meet with a student and talk about how aolcohol is affecting his life, knowing he and his peer group are drinking 3-4 nights per week (not counting in hangover time) and he responds with his average Gentlemen’s B, you lose some thunder. On the other hand, I’m not sure how a faculty member would survive the fallout following the blast from student evaluations if the appropriate workload were to be required.

    — Dave H · May 6, 03:40 PM · #

  14. Thanks, Dave. H. The student evaluations point is key. Unless that is changed nothing can be changed. When I was in college and we had incompetent or problematic professors we simply went to the department chair and/or the dean. Those individuals could check our records, measure our credibility, balance what we said with what else they had heard, and act. There was certainly ‘accountability’ and ‘student input’ but it was not anonymous and the students could be held accountable in the same way that the faculty were. No one will face the fact that student evaluations hold the untenured (and, of course, the adjunct) faculty completely hostage and create the consumer culture that leads to the omnipresent grade inflation and reduced expectations. If we all held hands and jumped off the cliff together, it might work . . . . The best we can probably hope for is a systematic pairing back of the process rather than its elimination. Quite apart from grade inflation and reduced expectations, there are other problems implicit in these evaluations. For example, they frequently ‘assess’ the use of information technology, implying that the use of PowerPoint, e.g., correlates with effective instruction. By implication, faculty are expected to put lecture notes on the web, obviating the need for class attendance and reducing instruction to bullet points rather than thoughtful discussion.

    — Observer · May 6, 04:35 PM · #

  15. Re: Observer

    The Great Learning tells your points. “Improving soceity” may be carrying an ultilitarian connotation. The proper meaning needs a separate thread.

    — Edgar · May 6, 08:21 PM · #

  16. Some years ago an essay entitled “The Eroding Conditions of Literary Study” appeared. It was a cogent analysis of one professor’s experience of how “busy” students’ lives were and how, in light of such time scarcity (caused in part by extra curricular commitments to which they —-especially women—were oversubscibed), the humanities suffered. Why? Because you can’t do a hurry-up job on Dostoevsky or Austen or Plato or Nussbaum. Their texts require time, the investment of leisure (the original word for “school” is related to the Greek word for “leisure” —- schole.)

    The essay was, as I’ve said, about Professor Engell’s own experiences at —-are you ready?—- Harvard.

    WE need to understand that many students today work outside school, either to pay for it, or, as I fear in all too many cases, to support a consumerist life style —- the idea of any material sacrifices being quite alien to them, not surprising in a world where we’ve been told by leaders that one patriotic response to terrorist attacks is to go on a shopping spree.

    I think I speak for many veteran teachers who acknowledge that their reading lists have continually shrunk over the years and that now there are just some texts, and authors, that, quite frankly, we no longer have the time for. And please don’t misunderstand me: I have always resisted the overly fat syllabus that emphasizes superficial coverage over quality reading. But as Engell said so well: the humanities courses require a kind of leisured “pace” and time investment which may, for all too many, no longer be available, either in school or out of it.

    — George T. Karnezis · May 7, 01:33 PM · #

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