Self-Reported Study Time is Incredibly Unreliable

by Justin Skycak (@justinskycak) on

Serious teachers know all about the slacking that goes on.

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.

Dozing off in lecture, chatting with study group friends, taking frequent meme-scrolling breaks (or any other kind of break)… all of these are often lumped into self-reported study time when they really shouldn’t be.

Back when I was teaching using the MA system, I only assigned about 40 minutes (40 XP) of homework per day, and students would have most of the 55-minute class period to work on it… and still, unless I really held students accountable for staying on task during class, plenty of slackers would complete less than 10 XP during class and then take 3 hours to complete the rest at home.

Now, I was totally fine with students socializing a bit during class, but they would often consider “a bit” to mean “basically the whole time” unless I intervened when it got out of hand. My usual intervention was that if you were getting less than 20 XP done during class, you would sit next to me the next class and I would make you stay focused the whole time. And you would earn your 40 XP.

This was also what I did in response to any parent email complaining about the amount of work. If you lie to your parents and tell them I’m making you do 3 hours of homework each night, and they email me about it, then:

  1. you're going to sit next to me during class
  2. you're going to stay on task
  3. you're going to get most if not all of your 40 XP done
  4. I'm going to email your parent that you did a good job staying on task
  5. during class today and completed all or most of your 40 XP within the class period
  6. your parents are going to realize you've been lying to them about the workload
  7. they're not going to take any more bullshit from you


Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.