One of the biggest problems for students their first year at a university is adjusting to the rigors of college classes and modifying their study habits to fit a new schedule and requirements.

According to Mary Ann Rasnak, director of the Student Development Center at Kansas University, students often fail to realize the difference between the quality of work required for high school classes where rote memorization can result in good grades and college courses where comprehension and utilization of information is expected.

“The transition issue is that high school is a little more about reading and spitting back information,” Rasnak said, “and the quality of information in college is supposed to be an understanding of the facts and an understanding of how to apply those facts to different situations and how to be critical or how to judge and evaluate information. Those are the big issues. Students often lose points on their first exams because they’ve done a lot of memorization but that’s not what’s expected.”

Another reason students have trouble early in their college careers is because they don’t understand the quantity of work required outside of class at the university level. Fitting that time into their schedule can also create problems.

“It looks very good to a new freshman wow, class three days a week who is accustomed to a much more structured schedule,” Rasnak said, “but the down side to that is less actual contact time, less time where the instructor is explaining what’s in the text and going over what was read.”

Student responsibility

That lack of face-to-face time with an instructor puts the responsibility of studying on a student, a task difficult to handle for some students. The chore can be even harder to understand when out-of-class work is assigned but not graded.

“In general there’s no one checking up to see if you’ve done your homework,” Rasnak said. “I hear students complain lots of times because they do homework but nobody checks it, and that’s because in a university like this one the expectation is that you’re responsible for your own mind. It’s an independent learning situation, and if you give yourself a pass and say you don’t have to do the work now because no one’s going to check it, the way they check to see if you’ve done it is on the test.”

Unfortunately for many students, it’s that first test that shows them if their study habits are working or not. If something in a student’s routine needs changed, it may be a time to visit the student development center.

“What we’re here for is to help students is to help students fine-tune their routines,” Rasnak said, “to make some small adjustments and learn new ways to do some things. It doesn’t mean a total makeover. It means a little bit of adjusting on where you’re studying, how you study, what you do when you study and see if we can make an improvement on the next round of exams in the eighth to 10th week so that you’re going on an upward trend.”

Rasnak said it’s that trend that’s the most important aspect of turning an early poor grade into a good final one.

“It isn’t that a low grade on the first exam means nothing,” she said, “it’s just that it means a lot less than it would on a final. If you get a low grade on the first exam and a little better on the second and a little better on the third, you’re in very good shape for the final. But if you stay low, your potential to do well on the final isn’t usually very good.”

Study times

One of Rasnak’s first recommendations is for students to study their most arduous, boring or unpleasant subject early in the day because research has shown that the best time to study for difficult courses is likely sometime during daylight hours, while evenings are best for relaxed studying of easier classes.

Whenever the study time, Rasnak suggests it be done away from home be it a dorm, fraternity, sorority or apartment because it’s too easy to take a nap, talk to a roommate or surf the Internet.

“I generally recommend that they find somewhere on campus to study,” Rasnak said, “beyond the typical recommendations of libraries. There’s nothing wrong with going to the libraries, but I’ve had too many students tell me they went to the library to nap. So it’s better to go to a smaller setting where you’re not so comfortable putting your head down and napping.”

Although students may prefer heading to the library or student union to study once class is dismissed, Rasnak says sticking around in that empty classroom may be beneficial.

“I like to recommend empty classrooms to students, especially those studying math,” Rasnak said, “because if you need to you can go up to the chalkboard and you can work on that big surface and really think through things as you’re doing them. I don’t think a lot of students take advantage of that, but it’s still a better alternative than your living space.”

‘Deadline driven’

Ironically, Rasnak says that students who have busy lives and little free time have the best study habits.

“The students I see who are most successful are the ones who are doing the most,” she said. “It’s hard for freshmen, because when they first get here they have a class schedule and a lot of unstructured time, which very quickly gets spent. When I meet the student who is working 10 to 20 hours a week, taking classes and involved in some sort of organization we all do better like that. We’re all deadline driven, but when you have the right amount of activity, you tend to operate more efficiently and are more likely to get things done.”

It’s not just freshmen who need quality study habits, though, as every level at a university expects a bit more from its students than the previous one.

“To be honest, those issues carry one throughout college,” Rasnak said. “They never end. When you get up to your more advanced courses the quality expectation gets even greater in terms of the level of thinking that’s expected, the quantity expectation often gets larger and the responsibility expectation gets even larger. They don’t go away, they just grow.

“That’s why they’re called study habits. If you develop a routine to deal with those three issues early on, the greater their probability for success. If you leave it to chance, you’re leaving your success to chance.”