If the average number of hours spent studying has indeed dropped by nearly 50% since the 1960s, is college getting easier, or are students getting that much smarter?
A study that followed more than 2300 students at a range of schools from the fall of 2005 to the spring of 2009 showed:
- In the first two years, 45% of students made no significant improvement in skills related to critical thinking, complex reasoning, and communication
- Of all grades at public universities, 73% were As and Bs, and 86% at private universities.
- Students who studied less than 5 hours per week had a collective GPA of 3.16
- Major that saw the most study-time for seniors: architecture, at 3.4 hours per day
As colleges respond to market forces that seek to compete to prepare learners for life and vocation, are they grading easier to feign learner success?
It’s certainly more complicated than that, but monitoring trends and extracting data are excellent places to begin.
Infographic sourced from content partners at onlinecolleges.net