How many hours do you spend on study?

[Klockan3]

I'm not cwatki14, but what does that have to do with anything?

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Read his first post in this topic. His point is that in his opinion his course load is so tough that the only way to manage is to study constantly with little to no sleep. The point is that I doubt that his course load is higher or even near that of for example what the top students in India takes. So if one of those students got to his school reading his courses s/he would be able to cruise through it without that much work.

Similarly in the US graduate studies are a ton tougher than the undergraduate ones, so if it is possible to cope with graduate course loads it should be possible to do undergrad without studying all that much no matter where you go.

 

[cwatki14]

Read his first post in this topic. His point is that in his opinion his course load is so tough that the only way to manage is to study constantly with little to no sleep. The point is that I doubt that his course load is higher or even near that of for example what the top students in India takes. So if one of those students got to his school reading his courses s/he would be able to cruise through it without that much work.

Similarly in the US graduate studies are a ton tougher than the undergraduate ones, so if it is possible to cope with graduate course loads it should be possible to do undergrad without studying all that much no matter where you go.

I claimed that study habits are a completely personal choice! Not everyone needs to study the same. I have no idea what the undergraduate environment is like in China or India, but sometimes I wonder why so many international students come to my university if it is not for the stellar academics? I am not saying I am better or work harder because I don't find many hours to sleep.

Also, there is no possible way to survive w/o studying, no matter how brilliant you are. When you're in a classroom with a plethora of other smart kids, you have no choice but to study because you are competing against all of your classmates for a percentile. All of my courses are curved, sometimes it is even to the point where 30% is the avg and there may be a large standard deviation. Courses are curved to a B-/C, so unless you want a 2.0, you better get some sincere study habits down. Extreme studying is a part of my universities culture, if you don't conform to it prepare to achieve little success, unless you're some extremely rare exception.

I am also not claiming that undergraduate courses are harder than graduate courses, I am just pointing out that at different university environments, there exists vastly different study habits/culture.

I also argue that if you aren't studying, well then you aren't learning the material very well. I don't know many people who take away the breadth and depth of subject from lecture and "pondering" the subject only.

 

[Klockan3]

Ah well, fair!

I claimed that study habits are a completely personal choice! Not everyone needs to study the same. I have no idea what the undergraduate environment is like in China or India, but sometimes I wonder why so many international students come to my university if it is not for the stellar academics?

Well, you can make all courses arbitrarily hard by just making the tests have harder problems, by forcing them to study more things or just by grading very harshly. That is very easy to do, you don't need a good teacher to have a hard course.

I think that the US top universities have really good teachers since it is a selling point for them, I think that this has to do with how in the US people view the universities as just another business, a good teacher allows you to learn the material so much better than a bad one so it really improves what you get. Hard courses on the other hand either just forces you to work harder and thus learn more which is good, or it overloads you and breaks you which is bad.

I assure you that hard program's exists everywhere, the difference is the skill of the teachers.