Study pressure can rise to 94 hours a week during exam time, Tilburg research shows

Living on microwave meals, ‘living’ in the library and putting all the fun things aside. For many students, it is a recognizable image during exam periods. They have too little insight into the study pressure and start learning too late. That can be done better, say Tilburg researchers.

Students often have too little awareness of the time they have to invest in their studies. As a result, they cannot prepare sufficiently for exams and run out of time, according to a Tilburg study into study pressure in higher education.

Final sprint

Because students take multiple courses and save real studies until just before the exams, this often leads to a peak load at the end of a period, sometimes up to 94 hours a week, write Astrid Kramer, Ya-Ping (Amy) Hsiao and Miranda Stienstra of Tilburg University.

Students often start a final sprint for an exam and then opt for so-called strategic learning. In doing so, they choose which teaching material they do and which material they do not learn. Stienstra: ‘You make a list in advance, and then you look at what you might be able to reproduce the next day, and then you learn that.’

In this way, students mainly learn to pass an exam, instead of learning to master the study material. Stienstra: ‘With ‘deep learning’, on the other hand, you are actively engaged with the material during the semester until it is anchored in your ready knowledge, and not just as a list that you have to memorize.’

Repetition

Because the exam periods are so intensive, many students take a step back afterwards. Kramer: ‘They need a week of rest, while the new lectures have already started. But that means a repetition of moves and new peak loads in the next period.’

Stienstra: ‘The result is that the calendar is so full that there is no room for failure. Everything you do as a student has to be as efficient as possible, so you first want to know what will be covered in that test, and you skip everything else. Students then respond like this, for example: Is there a guest lecture? Will that be discussed during the test? No? Well, then I won’t come.’

Test everything

Because the curriculum is full of teaching and exam weeks, there is insufficient balance between workload and well-being. Kramer: ‘In the Netherlands, we tend to make everything testable and to make a test or exam for everything. So, it sometimes makes sense that students learn for the points and not to master the material.’

The researchers argue for more transparency about study pressure. Stienstra: ‘Programs should not only make it clearer how much time tests, assignments, reading and preparation require but also intervene at several levels.’

Because the workload for students depends not only on the number of tests, the researchers say, but also, for example, on the level of difficulty, the spread of tests and the extent to which they count towards the final grade.

Kramer: ‘For example, teachers indicate in the syllabus that you have to learn two chapters next week but also indicate how much time that will take. By providing better insight into this, students can better distribute their time over the semester.’

Peace and space

A motivated student learns much better, Kramer emphasizes: ‘Students also have other things on their minds. They do a lot in addition to their studies and that gets tangled up at some point.’ According to the researchers the university must create more peace and space in the curriculum to enable students to learn better.

That was also the aim of the ‘a smarter academic year’ program, run by the then Minister of Education Dijkgraaf. A number of pilots have been started as an experiment to create more peace and space in higher education. Tilburg University now also wants to shorten the academic year.

Stienstra: ‘Our research is in line with that program and can be a starting point for a broad discussion in higher education: how can we be more transparent about the workload? Hopefully, this will lead to new insights and a different approach to the workload around tests and exams.’