How much time do you take to study?

Quen

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I know there are some pretty intelligent people that browse and respond on these boards, so I was wondering how much time did you guys and gals sacrifice to obtain such knowledge. Also, how many hours did you study, while going through each grade level. For example, a person could say he or she spent x number of hours studying, while in elementary, middle-school, high school, undergrad, etc.

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Studying during elementary school? Does that actually happen? :confused:

I maybe studied an hour per test in high school give or take a bit, depending on the class and material. Maybe 5-6 hours per final. I did the same for my freshman year of college. That didn't work well. I tried to up my game during my sophomore year, but lots of personal stress made that nearly impossible and fairly fruitless. The rest of college, I probably put in an hour of studying a night plus whatever other work I had to do. I'd study about 2 hours a day for 2-3 days for tests. Now, in med school, I'm putting in 3 solid hours per weekday, and about 7 per day on weekends. Double that for test weeks.

The time necessary for success is going to be different for everyone. I study less than just about everyone I know, but I'm still doing fine: B's across the board.
 
Yes, I think some kids, that are in elementary school, study pretty hard. I guess they're very motivated learners.

Anyhow, thanks for the reply. I think you're a great help on these forums. You always, in my opinion, give helpful and insightful responses. Now, I better get back to studying. :D
 
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I never studied in my entire life until my junior year of high school (which I'm in right now), and I mean that very literally. I never studied at all. Sometimes I didn't even do the homework.

I always made B's with the occassional A and I took about the hardest classes a freshman/sophomore could. I actually really regret not trying now, because I should've been a straight A student.

Right now I'm in Trig, College Algebra, English III, and PE and I don't really have to study, but I'm making straight 98-100%'s. So I'm mostly trying to independently study astronomy and anatomy, and also for the ACT/SAT.
 
I am a senior in high school, but don't really have the need to study most of the time. Currently, I'm in four AP classes, two normal ones, and have straight A's. Finals are this week, and I've been studying one to two hrs/day for the past week.

I'm thinking about 2-3 hours per day while in undergrad would be a wise decision on my part.
 
The only studying I did before college was commiting vocab lists/facts to short term memory directly before class. In undergrad I try to get away with as little as possible, which usually means cramming the night before. If I had to put it in hours, I'd say depending on the class I put in 1-3 hours the night before (or morning of if it's an afternoon class) for undergrad.
 
I didn't really study at all until junior year of college. Now I study ~10 hours per exam. (or more) depending on the class. It is hard to give just time amounts because it is really material dependent. Also, time studying matters so much less than how effective you study. This semester I have been group studying which means more time, but I think I get more out of it too, much easier to stay focused (except for times like now where I am on SDN).
 
Is the time doing homework considered as study time ?
 
During orientation they told us that “for every credit hour, you will have to study 2 hours/week.” So if you are taking 15 credits a semester, you will have 30 hours of studying to do/week (~4.3 hours/day). Fortunately, that’s not true.

It seriously depends on your learning style. I’m sort of a slacker. Personally, I start studying 3-4 days before an exam (material I know nothing about). During these 3-4 days, I study about 20 hours. This habit has bit me in the @SS more than once (finals), but I always seem to get through. This works best for me because I forget material really fast (like 3 days after the test). I barely study outside of “exam times”.

A lot of my friends are really into studying. They study about ~1 hr a day/course. They also study like crazy during exam time. They are into the “flashcard making” thing, and “group studying”, etc. I’m not a fan of that.

Basically, you have to find the right “learning method” for you.
 
I totally agree that it depends on the person, motivation, and learning style. I ugh lets just say am not the most motivated high schooler. I got the "YAY GRADUATION IS IN LESS THAN 7 MONTHS!" Thing going so my AP course? Yeah... let's pass with a C and get outta here! haha. College I'll be wayy different... I'll be like... study study study. I took a few courses at a local tech school and I was constantly studying. But high school? Whatever. haha. I'm double majoring (hopefully) and half of my courses will just be critisizing eachother's writings... so I'm sure I'll be super obssessive about studying and writing especially. Woo!
 
I did not start studying until high school, and I probably worked harder there then in college in terms of day-in and day-out studying. In college, would put in the time the weekend before the test in general (6-8 hrs total). In medical school first two years about 1-2 hours on weekdays and 7-8 hours total on weekends. Step 1? Probably around 7-8 hours a day for the last 3 weeks, before that 4 hours daily for 4 weeks.

Now on clinical clerkships? Rarely.
 
Man i am so worried about studying in college. I'm a senior in high school right now, and i don't do much studying. I use to study in elementary-middle school like 2-3 hours a day(Parents made me and studied with me). Throughout my high school career I've only studied for test the class before. Now in senior year i am trying to learn how to study, and use time management skills. But it seems that i always resort to last minute studying. It seems I'm always busy, and I'm worried its going to be the same in college. I work 20-30 hours of week and do sports/EC's. My average week is pretty hectic, and i don't feel like studying when i have down time...so i don't. I did my senior project the night before it was due. This strikes me as bad study skills. I could be a straight A student, but I'm a A B student. My high school GPA average is a 3.7 unweighted which isn't bad, but i feel that it could be better. Will there be any time in college to develop the necessary study skills, or are we just expected to have them all ready. Most of my friends have good study skills, they just... elude me. Any information on this would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks for all the replies! I enjoyed reading each one. If anyone else wants to share, please feel free to comment.

Local: I'm not currently in college, so I cannot answer your question; hopefully, someone else will help with your question.
 
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In my opinion, college is much better compared to high school in terms of school work. Although I pretty much barely studied for my exams in high school, we always had these bs projects, assignments, papers, etc... which took up a lot of time and were utterly useless. In college though, you pretty much have a few exams throughout the semester that you have to study for and maybe a few little assignments here and there. So the actual amount of school work I do in college is much less, and the yeild is much greater. Sure, come exam time, I have to put in quite a bit of studying, but during the weeks in between tests, I pretty much do very little school work. And you also have a lot more free time in college. In high school, I pretty much went to school from 8-3, and by the time I got home I would be too tired to do anything anyway. But in college, you have fewer hours of class, and I pretty much don't go to many classes anyway, so I get a lot more sleep, as well as have a lot more time to study when I need it. So for those of you still in high school, don't worry it gets a lot better :)
 
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Man i am so worried about studying in college. I'm a senior in high school right now, and i don't do much studying. I use to study in elementary-middle school like 2-3 hours a day(Parents made me and studied with me). Throughout my high school career I've only studied for test the class before. Now in senior year i am trying to learn how to study, and use time management skills. But it seems that i always resort to last minute studying. It seems I'm always busy, and I'm worried its going to be the same in college. I work 20-30 hours of week and do sports/EC's. My average week is pretty hectic, and i don't feel like studying when i have down time...so i don't. I did my senior project the night before it was due. This strikes me as bad study skills. I could be a straight A student, but I'm a A B student. My high school GPA average is a 3.7 unweighted which isn't bad, but i feel that it could be better. Will there be any time in college to develop the necessary study skills, or are we just expected to have them all ready. Most of my friends have good study skills, they just... elude me. Any information on this would be greatly appreciated.

The BIG thing to remember is that in college you have less class.

15 credit hours (depending on school and class type) is between 15-20 actual hours in class / week. American schools go 6 hours/day at 5 days which is 30 hours. Just there you have an extra 10-15 hours you didn't have before.

I was a procrastinator (and still am). The key is knowing what you are capable of and not trying to exceed that. Always stay on top of your grades. I know that I have a 93.4 in one class so I need to get an 85 or better to keep an A. That would take me about 6 hours of study time. (Thats a made up situation). Know the volume of material you can absorb in a given amount of time. Yeah, it takes practice, and if you don't get straight A's freshman year, it's not the end of the world. You probably have better study skills than you think. What helped me was going to the library, and not bringing a computer. The atmosphere for me was enough to get me to study. Maybe group study would work for you to get motivated. I notice that after doing group studying this semester I am also better at solo studying because I have made better habits. It is something I think you have to constantly improve on.
 
The BIG thing to remember is that in college you have less class.

15 credit hours (depending on school and class type) is between 15-20 actual hours in class / week. American schools go 6 hours/day at 5 days which is 30 hours. Just there you have an extra 10-15 hours you didn't have before.

I was a procrastinator (and still am). The key is knowing what you are capable of and not trying to exceed that. Always stay on top of your grades. I know that I have a 93.4 in one class so I need to get an 85 or better to keep an A. That would take me about 6 hours of study time. (Thats a made up situation). Know the volume of material you can absorb in a given amount of time. Yeah, it takes practice, and if you don't get straight A's freshman year, it's not the end of the world. You probably have better study skills than you think. What helped me was going to the library, and not bringing a computer. The atmosphere for me was enough to get me to study. Maybe group study would work for you to get motivated. I notice that after doing group studying this semester I am also better at solo studying because I have made better habits. It is something I think you have to constantly improve on.

See that's what bugs me! We go to school 40 hours a week... we work... we do clubs... we have volunteer stuff... sports... etc. and they expect us to do their pitiful daily work! I hatteee daily work. Projects... Tests...Essays... heck yah sign me up. Daily, little stuff that adds up to be a lot of points... uhh no. Daily work has been the reason I don't like math all these years. It's supposed to be practice... then don't grade it.. i get As on my tests! A little over 6 months and I'm graduating! I'm so excited.
 
too true. and many math classes still have homework you will need to do. I turn stuff in for stats every lecture.(it only takes like 10-20 mins to do though)
 
I know there are some pretty intelligent people that browse and respond on these boards, so I was wondering how much time did you guys and gals sacrifice to obtain such knowledge. Also, how many hours did you study, while going through each grade level. For example, a person could say he or she spent x number of hours studying, while in elementary, middle-school, high school, undergrad, etc.


I'm currently a Junior, doing a dual enrollment program with the local college, I didn't study at all during elementary school (people study K-5?), during Middle School . . . not really, just showed up "Test today !" me - "Ohh #$%^". During my freshman year in high school i rarely studied, however in my sophomore year i actually started studying a bit, only for tests, and that was the night before or morning of. As a junior, I don't really study for my 1 high school class, and for the classes at the college, i have a bad habit of just waiting until the day before to start reading the chapters for the first time ><. That 15 credits = 30 hours/week of outside class reading is far from true, i probably accumulate 1 hour of reading per week, for each class, so 15 credits = 3 hours of reading at the end of the week, and this is at a community college so it may be very different at a university (hopefully is ...).
 
What class have you guys studied for the most and why?

I actually don't have to study much for my math classes. They don't interest me too much, but I seem to have some sort of gift for it (that's what my trig teacher said anyway :rolleyes:).

Next semester when I'm taking AP Biology, I'm sure I'll study it a lot because it's fascinating.

Right now I study Anatomy/Physiology the most, even though I'm not taking a course for it in another year and a half.
 
How can you guys don't study and still be able to hand in homework ? During the classtime, my teacher just lecture or do labs. BTW, I'm in Canada.

And all the quizes are given in short answers so it's impossible to score an A without knowing all the details especially for Biology.
 
The sooner you develop good study habits the better. I didn't really study in high school and didn't really have to study until I started taking upper level science courses. (Studying really paid off in orgo and I made 99% both semesters.) Cramming would not work as well. I learned to study a little every night. Now that I'm in professional school, I start studying several days before a test (usually a 4 days-1 week depending on my schedule). This semester I have tests every Monday and Friday, so I feel pretty much slammed. Find techniques that work for you (flashcards, rewriting notes, summarizing, reading multiple times, studying in a group and quizzing each other, etc.) Finding which one works will take time, so I suggest doing it now or freshman year of college. It will serve you well.

PS My worst week this year: test Monday (Urinary Systems), quiz Tuesday (Clinical Pathology), quiz Thursday (Pharmacology), test Friday (Clinical Pathology) and I did my first surgery that Friday too. Needless to say, if I hadn't backed up and studied all along, I would've had a big grade dive that week.
 
I don't think I ever studied anything except french in middle school. I crammed the night before for those tests. In highschool I'd make a cram sheet the day before an exam and then look at it the morning before a test. I didn't study for the SATs which looking back probably was stupid but no one else did either back then that I knew.

In college I would make flash cards every night from the lectures for the day and then study them the night before an exam. I actually did get sort of hardcore for the MCAT since I did a review class with princeton review. Now in medschool I study quite a bit. In a 7 week block I take the first 4-5 days after a test off, then I move up to 3-4 hours a day for a few weeks, then up to about 8 hours a day for a few weeks and then 12 hour days for two weeks before an exam. I make my own study guides from the materials (lecture notes, books, powerpoints) and then go thru them over and over and over again to get the massive amount of detail in.
 
Probably organic chem. It requires alot of memorization and I allways did a bunch of practice problems during test week.


Agreed, by far the the most I've studied for any class. In contast, I am taking my 2nd bio pre req right now (zoology) and its the least ive studied.

One thing is true no matter what class I am taking, my study time would be cut in half if I didnt have SDN.
 
What class have you guys studied for the most and why?

AP Bio. There's a lot of memorization you have to do, and then after you memorize it, you have to look at it in context (situations, diseases, etc). I'm glad I'm interested in it, because if I wasn't, I don't know how I would be motivated enough to study for it. :thumbup:
 
AP Bio. There's a lot of memorization you have to do, and then after you memorize it, you have to look at it in context (situations, diseases, etc). I'm glad I'm interested in it, because if I wasn't, I don't know how I would be motivated enough to study for it. :thumbup:

Have fun with Ochem!! Haha. Its basiclly just what you described, but multiply the amount of info by like a billion. The bad news about that course is that its not one that most people are very intersted in. But maybe you will be one of the lucky (or crazy ones, depending on how you look at it) ones that is fascianted with the subject :D
 
I never studied in my entire life until my junior year of high school (which I'm in right now), and I mean that very literally. I never studied at all. Sometimes I didn't even do the homework.

I always made B's with the occassional A and I took about the hardest classes a freshman/sophomore could. I actually really regret not trying now, because I should've been a straight A student.

Right now I'm in Trig, College Algebra, English III, and PE and I don't really have to study, but I'm making straight 98-100%'s. So I'm mostly trying to independently study astronomy and anatomy, and also for the ACT/SAT.

We're very blessed to have you here with us.
 
Have fun with Ochem!! Haha. Its basiclly just what you described, but multiply the amount of info by like a billion. The bad news about that course is that its not one that most people are very intersted in. But maybe you will be one of the lucky (or crazy ones, depending on how you look at it) ones that is fascianted with the subject :D

Yep as you keep getting further it just keeps getting more and more insane. In medschool we covered an entire upper level undergrad biocourse (immuno) in two weeks (and that wasn't our only class at the time). I know that we went to the same depth because one of the people in our class took said class in undergrad and even used the same book!! And that was the "slow" part of the semester for that class. Its amazing how much you will grow in your ability to memorize massive amounts of information throughout this process.

An aside . . . if you were memorizing OChem you were doing it wrong. The only memorization is the names of each reaction. The rest of it can be reasoned through if you understand the electron's motives. Well the names and the mass spec BS.
 
What class have you guys studied for the most and why?
Probably M2 pharmacology or M1 neuroscience.

I studied a few hours a week in high school (aside from required homework), 15-20 hours a week in college, and about 30-40 hours a week in med school, with some stretches of nearly double that (finals week, Step 1). Until med school, the most I had studied for any class was organic 2. I thought it was a big deal that I studied about 30 hours for the final over the course of about four days. :laugh:
 
Yep as you keep getting further it just keeps getting more and more insane. In medschool we covered an entire upper level undergrad biocourse (immuno) in two weeks (and that wasn't our only class at the time). I know that we went to the same depth because one of the people in our class took said class in undergrad and even used the same book!! And that was the "slow" part of the semester for that class. Its amazing how much you will grow in your ability to memorize massive amounts of information throughout this process.

An aside . . . if you were memorizing OChem you were doing it wrong. The only memorization is the names of each reaction. The rest of it can be reasoned through if you understand the electron's motives. Well the names and the mass spec BS.

Agreed. Ochem is a very concept driven course, especially when writing out mechanisms and stuff like that. But in order to apply the concepts, you need to have a firm grasp on a large chunk of memorized information. A lot of our test questions were writing out mechanisms and such, which I agree you can understand if you konw the electron's motives, but there were still a lot of questions that were straight memorization. We would be given "reaction webs" that would have starting and ending products, with arrows everywhere and we would have to fill in the reagents that would cause the reactions to go. Theres no way you can conceptually figure out that answer. You either konw the reagent(s), or you dont. You might even know the mechanism by which the reactant is changed to the product (ie how the elctrons move), but if you cant remember what you add to make it happen, or what temperature it needs to be at, then you get it wrong.
 
the amount of time necessary to build knowledge isn't really quantifiable imo.

It's more of an attitude. When you're very young you start wondering why certain things happen, what rules predict their occurrence, what happened in history to bring us to this point in time, etc. Then throughout your entire life you are genuinely interested in finding out the answers to those questions, and when you discover something that "opens" your mind to a new concept or way of thinking, you apply that knowledge through teaching/working/tests, make it part of your overall understanding of life, and you remember it.
 
the amount of time necessary to build knowledge isn't really quantifiable imo.

It's more of an attitude. When you're very young you start wondering why certain things happen, what rules predict their occurrence, what happened in history to bring us to this point in time, etc. Then throughout your entire life you are genuinely interested in finding out the answers to those questions, and when you discover something that "opens" your mind to a new concept or way of thinking, you apply that knowledge through teaching/working/tests, make it part of your overall understanding of life, and you remember it.

That is deep.
 
It always changes a lot for me. On non-test weeks, I'll do maybe four hours total in a five-day span (not including assignments and other bulls*it work you have to). On test weeks, or a week before a double-test week I probably put in two hours a day, then crank it up on weekends.

After Thanksgiving break we have one full week and then exams. I'll basically be in the library every free hour I have of every day (I need to pull straight A's on exams to keep my GPA at ~3.85). I'm pretty sure thats the exception, however, and not the norm.
 
It always changes a lot for me. On non-test weeks, I'll do maybe four hours total in a five-day span (not including assignments and other bulls*it work you have to). On test weeks, or a week before a double-test week I probably put in two hours a day, then crank it up on weekends.

After Thanksgiving break we have one full week and then exams. I'll basically be in the library every free hour I have of every day (I need to pull straight A's on exams to keep my GPA at ~3.85). I'm pretty sure thats the exception, however, and not the norm.


god forbid it go down to a 3.8 :eek:. I know it can be scary, and applying to medical school is intimidating.....but just try and relax and have fun! Getting a B+ or an A- in a course is not going to desroy you, even if it brings down your GPA by a miniscule amount.
 
I didn't memorize anything for Ochem. I just learned the basic rules and applied them. Every mechanism follows simple rules (eg. neg attack positive) so those are simple and the rest of the stuff is conceptual.

I was told (and tell my 'students' now) that there are two ways to pass Organic Chemistry. You either memorize or you learn, and I can't teach memorization.
 
Let's see... almost done with med school, and the first 2 years of med school were more similar to 7-10th grade than anything else.

7-10th grade I was at a college prep school with LOTS of home work, proper final exams, big projects. It taught me how to study.

11-12th grade I transferred to a public school. Didn't study too much

College -- really didn't study much. Did my homework (took language classes = homework)
--I didn't study what I didn't like, so I didn't really study, chem, o-chem, physics

Med school -- didn't truly learn until shortly after starting M1 year that I have to study stuff even if I don't like it.
THEN I went back to my 7-10th grade study methods and started doing really well, even though i was studying A LOT.
 
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