Below are the depressingly unsurprising study habits of British AS level college students (16-19)* revealed through my blog data. I guess the headline is that my views double the night before the exam from a weekday average of 27K to 40K.
As some of you will be a bit sick of hearing, my main blog is ReviseSociology.com which is primarily an A-level sociology (16-19) revision website which focuses heavily on exam and revision technique, but also the main content of the course, extension work, book summaries and ‘sociology in the news’ so the main audience is A-level sociology students.
The point is that there is a lot of just teaching and learning and exploring resources on that blog, but far the most used are the exam technique posts, and so I think the above stats suggest some depressing facts about the way students study:
- Somewhat unsurprisingly, you can see the spike in popularity the night before…. Up from a daily (weekday) average of around 27K, almost doubling to nearly 40K views.
- What’s also equally interesting, and depressing, is the punishing predictability of the daily views on the different days of the week - highest Mondays and Tuesdays and weekdays in general, dipping Friday (possibly because colleges have a shorter day) and then dipping away on Saturday and Sunday, back up the following Monday…
- It’s a shame I’ve got no reliable (immediate) way of showing you the time stats, but you’ll have to take my word for it…. when I wake up at 6.00 a.m, I typically have around 3K views for that day from the USA, my hits from the UK start to climb suddenly at 9.00 a.m. on a weekday, and maintains a rate of around 1200 an hour all day until 16.00 when it tails off.
- Needless to say my views also vary by month - May and June are the peak, dipping considerably in July.
What does this suggest about student study habits?... Basically that many of them do their studies in college only and tail off when at home, except when there's an imminent deadline looming.
How valid are these stats as in an indicator of students not working outside of college as a general rule?
personally I’d say they are very valid
- OK not every student uses my blog, so all we are getting here is data on the kinds of students that do use blogs to revise…. It may be that there are 10K students out there who only use books or other sites and they have different study patterns.
- However, of those students that do use my blog, I’ve got so much data, and it is so consistent, that I think this gives good validity.
- The above stats correlate with my own in-college observations that students really don’t tend to do that much work, and there is a surge in demand for ‘revision classes’ immediately before the exam: lots of students leave it too late, even with all the warnings.
Final thoughts..
It could also be that AS levels are now something of a ‘second tier qualification’ (compared to the full A levels in June) so these are either students ‘peeling off’ and dropping this subject after one (rather than two) years or these are just tester exams before the real things next year, in which case I wouldn’t expect that much of a dedicated effort.
HOWEVER, I'm fully expecting an intensification of these patterns come the 4th June, the night before the first full A-level!
Of course, perhaps my site only encourages slacker students, I have had the odd comment such as ‘lol, bun sociology’... it’s a possibility in this ‘structurated' age.
Statistically inspired Poem
When all through the country
No one was stirring,
Except for a few desperate teenagers destined to fail their exams.
(Because all those who are going to pass would have already revised and be getting a good night’s sleep!)
