Students tend to suffer from poor planning strategies. Right now I can see this happening with the final projects that the students in my class have to turn in. Many left it for the last minute, even though they knew they had to work on them since the class began and even though I tried to remind them periodically to pick a topic and start working on it. This is part of the skills one has to develop at some point.
Here is a bit of advice from experience:
- If you know you have a project to turn in on some date, start working on it early.
- Find resources and ask for guidance sooner, rather than later. This is especially true for academic work which might require digging through a whole bunch of almost incomprehensible and outdated material that contains the answers one needs. Usually it takes a while to decipher old notation, etc.
- If you get stuck in a calculation, ask for help. At least you might be pointed in a different direction than you have been attacking the problem.
- Make time for sleep. Studies have shown that people who try to cram at the last minute have almost no retention of material. Good sleep makes a huge difference in performance.
- Sometimes there are inputs into calculations that are ‘obvious’ but never stated. Especially if one has matched to some piece of data.
- If you have a final exam, start studying for it from the beginning of the term. It makes a huge difference: if you don’ understand something you have ample time to ask questions and to get the information. Studying in groups is also helpful: some people can only really learn something if they are trying to explain it to someone else who points out the deficiencies in the arguments.
Also important: get proper nutrition, make sure to get some exercise and don’t forget to socialize a little bit.
School became trivial the day you realize you spend less time doing a once over reading of your notes once every 3 days, rather than cramming for hours the night before.
Even better is if you have a friend who takes impeccable notes, so that you don’t have too. I stopped taking them for most classes somewhere late as an undergrad, instead focusing on understanding the material as its being presented.
Good old Kant would have to say something about this method.
When I was a student I had a personal rule of never touching the material of any course 48 hours before its exam. This was to avoid getting bored with the material, or mentally tired in general, which would generally result in my rushing through the exam just to get it over with. I recommend that rule, I had lots of fun during exam periods.
(Yes, I’m still alive, just too busy to blog).
(Yes, I’ve felt that way myself for the past, oh! I don’t know how long…)
The problem isn’t that students don’t know how important each of these items of advice are.
The problem is that students know what to do, but then choose not to do it.
They may be overworked from too many other commitments, or they may not be serious about their education, or they may want to get things done the right way, but be perpetual procrastinators for complicated psychological reasons.
Disseminating information about planning can only be helpful, but I think that in general students cram or half-ass it because they just don’t know any better.
One thing that I think may contribute to the problem is that students can frequently get by with cramming, especially if they’re smart. They may not get a great grade, but they get a reasonable one and move on, learning little and forgetting what they did learn.
In particular, many undergraduates view classes as a place to get a grade. Learning the material is important to them insofar as it allows them to get good grades and therefore get into a good grad school or impress employers.
If your outlook is that you want to get a certain grade, you’re not going to be as involved in the material as you would be if you were motivated by learning or by doing truly good work for its own sake.
I am an undergraduate, and people talk about classes all the time. Mostly, though, they talk about how much work the class has, and how hard the work is, and what the format of the test will be, etc. They don’t sit around talking about how cool the subject matter is.
That’s the thing we really want to change. Don’t ask me how.
meant to say, “I don’t think that students cram because they don’t know any better.”
Something dies inside you when you decide to not go to any of the classes, just do the homework and show up for the final exam and still get an A or A-. This happened frequently when I was a bored freshman and sophomore. A habit that was hard to undo, especially for classes that you aren’t keen on.
Differences in knowledge between students at that stage is enormous, even in Ivy leagues. A typical math/physics student is going to breeze through a social science requirement like it wasn’t even there but will get in trouble later on b/c he/she isn’t developing proper work habits.
Invariably, at one point it becomes obvious that you are wasting money.
Hi Meichenl:
In my case it is a class for graduate students and I do understand that they have other time commitments. When a student tells me that he has not slept more than ten hours in the past week I naturally get worried and offer what can be considered as well intentioned ‘self-help advice’.
My memory of being a student is that I didn’t have a moment to spare from the start of the semester through the final exam. So the advice to “start early”, while well-intentioned, doesn’t work in practice. Starting early on one thing means you fall even further behind in something else.
But item #3 is excellent advice. I didn’t take advantage of that enough.
George
I think graduates usually think research is much more important than general course work. Unless the course is closely related to their research, they tend not to spend too much time on them. I am one of these graduates.