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What’s Covered:

• Factors to Consider
• When Do You Have To Declare Your Major?
• Hardest College Majors
• Easiest College Majors

Does Your Intended Major Impact Your College Chances?

For incoming undergraduate students, choosing a major can be overwhelming. That’s because your field of study will have meaningful consequences for your future life. Choosing the right major can open the door to engaging work that pays a living wage. On the other hand, selecting the wrong major could result in years of unhappiness if the related work is not interesting, takes up too much time, or doesn’t pay well. 

It might relieve some of your stress to know the important factors to consider when choosing your major, to be familiar with the most challenging and least challenging undergraduate majors, and to remember that your major choice isn’t binding yet . In this helpful guide to choosing your major, we will walk through all of that to help you find a major that suits your needs, interests, and goals.

Factors to Consider When Choosing A Major

Does the work interest me? You will have a much harder time securing good grades and retaining concepts if you are pursuing a major that does not interest you. We are not saying you have to choose something that fascinates you—not everyone can be a professional musician or writer—but make sure you choose a major that holds your attention.

Do I have natural talent in this field? Everyone’s brain is wired a little differently. It follows that certain subjects will be easier for certain students. Natural talent is not a prerequisite for pursuing a given major. In fact, many leaders in their field report initial setbacks that they had to work hard to overcome. However, choosing to major in an area where you already have an intellectual advantage based on your brain chemistry is a good way to make your college years easier.

How much time do I want to spend studying? Realistically, academic coursework is not every student’s top priority. One of the best parts of college is making lifelong friendships. Another is exploring your interests through clubs and internships. Only commit to a time-intensive major if it really is your top priority in college.

What career options will be available to me after graduating? Too many times, we see students treat their undergraduate years as being completely unrelated to what they will do after school. Then, when they find certain career paths are closed to them, they become disappointed. Avoid this outcome upfront by choosing a major with your future career in mind. If you are interested in exploring many different fields, choose a major like Communications or Economics that opens the door to many different industries. If you already know you want to pursue a very specific path, such as film or medicine, choose a major and take the courses that prepare you for your industry.

What are my financial prospects with this major? Even if your goal is not to become a millionaire, keeping an eye on finances will save you a lot of heartache in the long run. If you are split between two majors, consider using return on investment (ROI) as your tie-breaker. If you want to go into a less lucrative field, that is okay! Just be sure you are not taking out large loans to finance a major that will take decades to repay.

When Do You Have To Declare Your Major? And Can You Change It?

When you apply to different universities, you will probably be asked for your intended major . This major is either the program you will enter into as an incoming freshman or, if your institution doesn’t allow you to declare your major until later in your undergraduate studies, it’s the major you think you will declare when the time comes. Sometimes (typically if your intended program is competitive or requires specific technical or artistic skills) you will need to submit a supplemental application or a portfolio for your intended major.

In general, your intended major is exactly what it sounds like: an intention to study a discipline, not set in stone . And many students change their major (hassle-free) throughout their undergraduate years.

Because universities require a certain number of total university credits for graduation, a students’ coursework is generally divided into three components: general education or distribution requirements, major requirements, and minor or elective courses. Students who are unsure about their major might take their elective courses in diverse fields when trying to come to a conclusion about their desired field of study. On the other hand, if you change your major too late, you may delay your graduation, so it is important to plan as you explore . It is also important to remember that, at many universities and colleges, it is easier to change your major within a school than between schools.

Generally, universities will ask you to declare your major by the end of your sophomore year.

CollegeVine’s Top 10 Hardest Majors

To help you start thinking about which major is best for you, we put together a ranked list of the ten hardest majors. We used a combination of lowest average GPA, highest number of hours spent studying, and lowest return on investment (ROI) to determine which majors are the hardest to pursue. In these listings, you’ll notice the statistic, 20-year ROI. A 20-year ROI is the difference between the 20-year median pay for a graduate with a bachelor’s degree in the listed major and the 24-year median pay for an individual with only a high school diploma, minus the total 4-year cost of obtaining a bachelor’s degree. It effectively tells how much better off graduates are financially due to obtaining a bachelor’s degree in a specific area.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and your list of hardest majors likely would be different than ours. As you read, think about what makes some of these majors easier or harder for you .

10. Fine Arts

Average GPA: 3.2

Average Weekly Study Hours: 16.5

Predicted 20-Year ROI: -$163,600

Find schools with a Fine Arts major that match your profile.

This goes on our list of hardest majors because it has such a low return on investment. For students to make this major a successful choice, they will have to spend hours distinguishing themselves from their peers. The same principle applies to other artistic fields, including creative writing, musical theater, dance, and music. If you pursue a creative major, make sure you cultivate a marketable skill alongside it. Consider teaching, art restoration, or technical writing for a skill that complements your love of art.

Potential Careers Paths and Median Salaries for Fine Arts Graduates:

• Professional Artist: $49k
• Art Director: $97k
• Graphic Designer: $53k
• Interior Designer: $60k
• Art Professor (requires further education): $85k

9. Philosophy

Average GPA: 3.1

Average Weekly Study Hours: 16

Predicted 20-Year ROI: $202,000

Find schools with a Philosophy major that match your profile.

Philosophy demands attention to detail and command of logic. On average, philosophy majors spend more time than most college students studying, and those hours require high levels of concentration. Many philosophy majors pursue careers in law or academia because those fields reward hard work, careful reasoning, and attention to detail. Both of these fields require an advanced degree, so be prepared to stay in school for a while.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Philosophy Graduates:

• Non-Profit Professional: $70k
• Lawyer (requires further education): $127k
• Philosophy Professor (requires further education): $88k
• Public Policy Professional (requires further education): $125k

8. Cellular and Molecular Biology

Average Weekly Study Hours: 18.5

Predicted 20-Year ROI: $382,000

Find schools with a Cellular and Molecular Biology major that match your profile.

Cellular and molecular biology is the biology major with the heaviest workload and lowest average GPA. Students who tend to do well in this field are able to visualize concepts even when they cannot see them with the naked eye. Understanding how different parts of a system work together is a useful skill that this major cultivates. With a cellular and molecular biology undergraduate degree, can pursue an advanced degree or dive straight into the workforce upon graduating, depending on your area of interest.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Cellular and Molecular Biology Graduates:

• Research Assistant: $46k
• Physician (requires further education): $185-271k
• Biology Professor (requires further education): $101k
• Pharmacist (requires further education): $129k

7. Accounting

Predicted 20-Year ROI: $563,000

Find schools with an Accounting major that match your profile.

Accounting majors have a great return on investment (ROI) since nearly every person and company requires the services of an accountant at some point in their life cycle. If you like mathematics, specifically applied math, this may be a great fit major for you. Becoming an accountant requires long apprenticeships and lots of studying after graduating from college. However, you can get a well-paid job right out of college, as businesses love to hire folks with this quantitative background.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Accounting Graduates:

• Accountant: $74k
• Financial Analyst: $84k
• Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerk: $42k

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class: 17

Predicted 20-Year ROI: $525,000

Find schools with a Nursing major that match your profile.

This major has a high workload but amazing job prospects. Upon receiving licensure, graduates are practically guaranteed a job for life in a growing industry. College graduates typically earn a BSN but may continue their studies to become an MSN. Advanced schooling allows MSNs to specialize, depending on their desired career path. Nurses spend less time in school than doctors and have more in-person contact with patients.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Nursing Graduates:

• Registered Nurse: $75k
• Midwife: $111k
• Nurse Anesthetists: $184k

5. Architecture

Average GPA: 3.3

Average Weekly Study Hours: 22

Average Salary: $67,000

See the best schools for architecture.

This major goes on our list of hardest majors because of the weekly grind. The average architecture major spends 22 hours preparing for class. Students who want to pursue this field need to be ready to spend hours drafting and studying. Upon graduating, your job prospects are fairly narrow because your skills are specialized. That means that when a lot of construction is taking place, you are likely to be in demand. Conversely, if new building projects are not being commissioned, it may be harder to find a job.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Architecture Graduates:

• Building Architect: $82k
• Landscape Architect: $71k
• Architectural Drafter: $58k

Find schools with a Physics major that match your profile.

Physics makes this list because of the long hours students have to spend getting ready for class each week. A highly conceptual field, physics may be right for you if you like to think abstractly about how forces and objects interact. Keep in mind that pursuing a career in physics often requires you to get an advanced degree after graduating from college.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Physics Graduates:

• Physicist: $129k
• Biophysicist: $94k
• Physics Professor (requires further education): $104k

3. Electrical Engineering

Average Weekly Study Hours: 19.5

Predicted 20-Year ROI: $850,000

See the best schools with Engineering majors.

Electrical Engineering majors put in some of the longest hours of all college students, but the return on investment (ROI) is very high. If you love circuitry, fixing equipment, and designing better ways to get a job done, this could be a great fit career for you. A degree in engineering sets you up to perform well as an engineer or, later in your career, as the manager of a team of engineers. Advanced study is encouraged but not required to succeed in this field.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Electrical Engineering Graduates:

• Electronics Engineer: $103k
• Aerospace Engineer: $117k
• Communications Engineer: $110k
• Computer Hardware Engineer: $120k

2. Chemical Engineering

If you love to leverage your knowledge of science to transform materials, chemical engineering could be a great fit for you. This is another high input, high output field, so expect to work long hours but also to earn a large salary after graduation. If you love chemical engineering but do not want to become an engineer, consider a career in academia or patent law. These career paths require graduate school, in the form of a Ph.D., J.D., or both.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Chemical Engineering Graduates:

• Chemical Engineer: $109k
• Environmental Engineer: $99k

1. Chemistry

Average GPA: 2.9

See the best schools for Chemistry majors

We have chosen chemistry as our #1 hardest major because of its low average GPA combined with the long hours of studying required. If you are fascinated by how minuscule, invisible changes can completely alter a substance, chemistry is a great major to consider. It is hard work to earn a degree in chemistry, but once you do, a wide range of career options open to you. Typically, earning an advanced degree after college is necessary to pursue a career incChemistry.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Chemistry Graduates:

• Chemical Manufacturing: $91k
• Chemistry Professor (requires further education): $92k

Discover your chances at hundreds of schools

Our free chancing engine takes into account your history, background, test scores, and extracurricular activities to show you your real chances of admission—and how to improve them.

CollegeVine’s Top Easiest Majors

We have put together our list of top easiest majors based on three factors: GPA, weekly study hours, and return on investment. Keep in mind that your factors may be different! Read our brief summary of each major to see if it may be a good fit for you.

Predicted 20-Year ROI: $240,000

See the best schools for English majors.

If you love language and literature, majoring in English is a great way to gain exposure to strong writing. We are including it on the list of easiest majors because it has a relatively high GPA and because most homework preparation is reading literature, an act that English majors find pleasurable in itself. As far as salary is concerned after graduation, English majors have to work a bit harder to ensure they have a steady source of income. Consider choosing a second major or a minor that cultivates a marketable skill. Or, if you wish to pursue a literary career, use summers and your time outside of class to distinguish yourself with internships and publications. You are entering a competitive field, so it helps to have relevant experience outside of class.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for English Graduates:

• Writer: $67k
• Editor: $63k
• High School Teacher: $63k

8. Economics

Average GPA: 3.0

Average Weekly Study Hours: 15

Predicted 20-Year ROI: $626,000

See the best schools for Economics majors.

Economics majors spend a pretty typical amount of time studying relative to other college majors. However, when they graduate, their earning potential is very high. If you are looking for a field that lets you work hard but not too hard while still bringing home a healthy paycheck, Economics is a great field to consider. It strengthens students’ quantitative reasoning by introducing them to a range of real-world, practical financial problems that can be observed in society. 

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Economics Graduates:

• Economist: $108k
• Actuary: $111k

7. Journalism

Average Weekly Study Hours: 13

Find schools with Journalism majors that match your profile.

Journalism majors have relatively high average GPAs relative to peers, and they do not have to spend exorbitant amounts of time studying. That said, it is difficult to secure a full-time position as a journalist, especially if there is a particular subject you long to cover. The strongest applicants to journalism positions have spent years working for local, regional, and national publications prior to applying for their first full-time job. So, consider journalism if you do not want to have a busy course load, but expect that you will devote that extra time to related clubs, writing projects, and internships.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Journalism Graduates:

• Reporter/Correspondent: $49k
• Radio/Television Broadcaster: $73k

6. Criminal Justice

Average Weekly Study Hours: 12

Predicted 20-Year ROI: $139,000

See the best schools for Criminal Justice majors.

If you find courts, policing, and corrections fascinating, a career in criminal justice may be for you. Students learn how to apprehend, reprimand, and rehabilitate those who commit crimes. This field does not require much time in class but does demand a certain emotional resilience, as course content will at times be disturbing. Job prospects upon graduating exist but are limited, so college graduates with this major should consider careers as police officers and lawyers, both of which require additional training.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Criminal Justice Graduates:

• Police Detective: $87k
• Private Detective: $53k

5. Public Relations & Advertising

Find schools with Public Relations majors that match your profile.

Do people fascinate you? Do you watch the Super Bowl for the ads? Have you been known to tell a captivating story? If so, public relations & advertising may be the field for you. These students integrate their understanding of the human mind with the business objectives of companies and other large enterprises. They help to shape attitudes around a product, initiative, or idea. Students who graduate with a degree in this field often secure employment quickly because companies are always looking for people with a talent for connecting with consumers. No graduate school is required to build a fulfilling career in this industry.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Public Relations & Advertising Graduates:  

• Marketing Manager: $161k
• Public Relations Specialist: $63k
• Advertising and Sales Agent: $55k

4. Social Work

Average GPA: 3.4

Find schools with Social Work majors that match your profile.

It is somewhat deceptive to say social work is an easy major, even though it meets the criteria we are using for this list. Often, the greatest difficulty associated with this field is the emotional strain it takes to build a career in social work. Students who do best in social work are highly resilient and practice self-care. If you want to make a practical difference in the lives of others and possess a high EQ (Emotional Quotient, also known as emotional intelligence), consider this major. Earning a graduate degree is customary for those who wish to pursue a career in social work.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Social Work Graduates:

• Mediator: $66k
• Healthcare Social Worker (requires further education): $58k
• Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Worker (requires further education): $48k
• Child, Family, and School Social Worker (requires further education): $48k

3. Education

Average GPA: 3.6

Average Weekly Study Hours: 14

Predicted 20-Year ROI: -$9,000

Find schools with Education majors that match your profile.

We are including education on the list of easiest majors because of the high average GPA. But be warned! It has an extremely low return on investment. If you are thinking of pursuing a teaching career, consider getting your undergraduate degree in your subject of interest rather than in teaching. With a teaching minor or summer program, you can easily fulfill your requirements to become a teacher. However, your major will give you more flexibility and earning potential in other careers if teaching does not turn out to be the field for you.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Education Graduates:

• Instructional Coordinator (requires further education): $67k
• Education Administration (requires further education): $98k
• School Counselor (requires further education): $58k

2. Psychology

Average Weekly Study Hours: 13.5

Predicted 20-Year ROI: $198,000

See the best schools for Psychology majors.

Only within the past hundred years have we begun to objectively measure, analyze, and evaluate human behavior. Psychology majors study the progress we have made so far and participate in social science research to make further discoveries in their field. Psychology students typically have high GPAs relative to their peers, and the weekly homework load is not unreasonable. Job prospects coming out of psychology are not ample, but students willing to pursue a Ph.D. can become professors and lab researchers within their field of interest.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Psychology Graduates:

• Research Assistant: $49k
• Substance Abuse Counselor: $48k
• Clinical Psychologist (requires further education): $82k
• Psychology Professor (requires further education): $90k

1. Business Administration

See the best schools for Business majors.

Business administration ranks as our #1 easiest college major because it has that perfect trio of low weekly homework load, high average GPA, and great ROI. If you have solid business acumen, a head for figures, and a desire to work with people, could be a great-fit major for you. Just because it is easy to succeed in this major does not mean it is full of only easy classes. You can challenge yourself by taking rigorous quantitative courses and participating in internships that give you a taste of real-world business administration. No graduate school is required to excel in this field.

Potential Career Paths and Median Salaries for Business Administration Graduates:

• Management Analyst: $88k
• Personal Financial Advisor: $89k

You might also like our posts:

Easiest and Hardest Engineering Majors

Easiest and Hardest Science Majors

Because universities know that an intended major isn’t concrete, a student’s intended major generally will not affect whether or not they are accepted to a university. 

However, there are certain instances where an intended major may affect college chances. Some prestigious programs that directly admit students (like the USC Cinema Program or Penn’s Wharton School) have lower acceptance rates than that of the general university. Additionally, some large public universities (like those in the UC system) have specific numbers of students that they will accept for each major program. At these schools, if you are “on the bubble” for admissions, your intended major may become a factor.

Simply put, if your intended major has an impact on admissions, the impact will be very small . In general, your GPA, test scores, extracurriculars, and essays will determine your chances of admission at different colleges. To predict your odds of acceptance at over 500 schools across the country (using those important admissions factors!), utilize our free chancing engine . This engine will let you know how your application compares to those of other applicants and will also help you to improve your profile.

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College Is Not Like High School...It’s Way, Way Better

Last Updated: March 28, 2024 Fact Checked

Is college harder than high school?

How college is different from high school, is college right for you, how to be successful in college, expert interview.

This article was co-authored by Alicia Oglesby and by wikiHow staff writer, Johnathan Fuentes . Alicia Oglesby is a Professional School Counselor and the Director of School and College Counseling at Bishop McNamara High School outside of Washington DC. With over ten years of experience in counseling, Alicia specializes in academic advising, social-emotional skills, and career counseling. Alicia holds a BS in Psychology from Howard University and a Master’s in Clinical Counseling and Applied Psychology from Chestnut Hill College. She also studied Race and Mental Health at Virginia Tech. Alicia holds Professional School Counseling Certifications in both Washington DC and Pennsylvania. She has created a college counseling program in its entirety and developed five programs focused on application workshops, parent information workshops, essay writing collaborative, peer-reviewed application activities, and financial aid literacy events. There are 9 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 15,214 times.

College can be an amazing and unforgettable time in your life. But whether you’ve just been accepted to your dream school or still aren’t sure if you should even apply, you’re probably wondering: is college hard? It’s a fair question! College is different from high school in many ways. The classes, homework, readings, and even the people you meet will be different—but you can definitely succeed with the right mindset. Still feeling worried? Don’t sweat it. This guide will answer all your basic questions about going to college. Keep reading to learn what makes college different from high school, how to decide if college is right for you, and how to be successful in college once you get there.

Things You Should Know

• College classes are harder. The readings, exams, and homework are more intense, and the material itself is more complex.
• You decide what you want to study. Your area of focus is usually called your “major.” Different colleges and universities offer different majors.
• Practicing good study habits, managing your time, and seeking extra help are just some of the many things you can do to be successful in college.
• College is not for everyone, but obtaining a college degree increases your chances of having a career you enjoy, and that pays reasonably well.

• College really has something for everyone. You’ll have lots of opportunities to make friends by joining clubs, playing sports, or attending events on campus.
• As long as you go to class, do your work, and ask for help when you need it, you’ll stand an excellent chance of succeeding.
• Living independently can be hard at first, but you’ll get used to it over time. Everyone you’ll meet will be in the same boat, so don’t fret.

• Of course, not all classes will be super hard. As with high school, some classes—and some professors—are easier than others.

• Different colleges and universities offer different majors. Check the websites of the colleges you’re interested in to find out which majors are available, or have a chat with your high school guidance counselor. They’ll advise you on which colleges offer which majors.
• Many colleges still have a list of “required courses” that everyone has to take. These might include history, English composition, and a basic science course, among others. It all depends on the college.

• In really big classes, the professor may have graduate students called teaching assistants—or “T.A.s” for short. T.A.s are often younger and more relaxed than the professor, so they’re a great resource if you have any questions or need extra help.

• Most dorms have laundry rooms where you can wash your clothes for a fee, and common spaces have sinks where you can wash dishes.

• You’ll become better and better at studying over time. As with any skill, the more you practice, the more you’ll succeed.

• In some cases, you can even join organizations that are not directly affiliated with your school, like a local volunteer group in town.

• Ask about financial aid when you apply to a college. Most colleges and universities have financial aid officers whose sole job is to help students pay for school.
• Your high school guidance counselor can also help you decide which schools are more affordable.

Alicia Oglesby

Choosing the right college is about more than just the cost to attend. Look beyond the sticker price to consider more than just what tuition your family could realistically manage each year. Ensure the academic offerings match your interests and career aspirations. Get a feel for campus culture and vibe by taking tours and chatting with current students.

• A bachelor’s degree sets you up to obtain higher degrees later on. For example, you may work as a banker for several years after college, before going to law school or business school.

• When in doubt, talk to a guidance counselor, college admissions officer, or even one of your teachers. They can help you weigh the pros and cons of attending college.

• Traveling abroad is easier when you’re younger. It can also give you valuable life experience, which you can take with you to college and beyond. [5] X Research source
• Many servicemembers and veterans of the U.S. military receive tuition assistance, meaning that part or all of their college education is paid for after a certain amount of time served. [6] X Research source

• By minimizing your workload in the beginning, you’ll have an easier time adjusting to your new environment. This makes it more likely that you’ll succeed academically.

• Sometimes, a class will only be offered at an inconvenient time. Other classes won’t be offered every semester. Do your best to create a schedule that works for you.
• Talk to an academic advisor to plan your schedule. They can advise you about which classes to take. [7] X Research source

• Use Google Calendar , Apple Calendar , or a similar calendar app if you prefer to keep things digital. Apps also let you set reminders for deadlines, upcoming events, and more.

• If you can’t attend class for any reason, let your professors know. They’ll often try to work with you, especially if you miss class due to physical illness, mental health, or family issues.

• Many colleges and universities have tutors in multiple subjects.
• Study groups can be great—especially for subjects like foreign languages, where conversation practice is important to your grade.

• If your classes have Teaching Assistants—or “T.As.,”—talk to them too. Most of them will be graduate students or undergraduates with extensive knowledge of the course. They can be a great resource when you have questions or need extra help.

• Many campus groups will advertise events through newsletters, flyers, and information tables during your initial orientation and throughout the academic year.

Expert Q&A

You might also like.

Thanks for reading our article! If you’d like to learn more about college life, check out our in-depth interview with Alicia Oglesby .

• ↑ https://www.kings.edu/admissions/hs_sophomores_and_juniors/preparing_for_college/high_school_vs_college
• ↑ https://money.usnews.com/money/careers/slideshow/25-best-jobs-that-dont-require-a-college-degree
• ↑ https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/what-a-gap-year-is-and-how-it-prepares-students-for-college
• ↑ https://www.military.com/education/money-for-school/tuition-assistance-ta-program-overview.html
• ↑ https://www.snow.edu/blog/25_Tips_To_Help_You_Survive_Freshman_Year.html
• ↑ https://stories.marquette.edu/what-piece-of-advice-would-you-give-to-your-freshman-self-fc84d53af190
• ↑ https://www.rasmussen.edu/student-experience/college-life/time-management-tips-college/
• ↑ https://www.rasmussen.edu/student-experience/college-life/struggling-in-college/
• ↑ https://www.goodwin.edu/enews/struggling-in-college-advice-for-students/

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College Homework: What You Need to Know

• April 1, 2020

Samantha "Sam" Sparks

• Future of Education

Despite what Hollywood shows us, most of college life actually involves studying, burying yourself in mountains of books, writing mountains of reports, and, of course, doing a whole lot of homework.

Wait, homework? That’s right, homework doesn’t end just because high school did: part of parcel of any college course will be homework. So if you thought college is harder than high school , then you’re right, because in between hours and hours of lectures and term papers and exams, you’re still going to have to take home a lot of schoolwork to do in the comfort of your dorm.

College life is demanding, it’s difficult, but at the end of the day, it’s fulfilling. You might have had this idealized version of what your college life is going to be like, but we’re here to tell you: it’s not all parties and cardigans.

How Many Hours Does College Homework Require?

Here’s the thing about college homework: it’s vastly different from the type of takehome school activities you might have had in high school.

See, high school students are given homework to augment what they’ve learned in the classroom. For high school students, a majority of their learning happens in school, with their teachers guiding them along the way.

In college, however, your professors will encourage you to learn on your own. Yes, you will be attending hours and hours of lectures and seminars, but most of your learning is going to take place in the library, with your professors taking a more backseat approach to your learning process. This independent learning structure teaches prospective students to hone their critical thinking skills, perfect their research abilities, and encourage them to come up with original thoughts and ideas.

Sure, your professors will still step in every now and then to help with anything you’re struggling with and to correct certain mistakes, but by and large, the learning process in college is entirely up to how you develop your skills.

This is the reason why college homework is voluminous: it’s designed to teach you how to basically learn on your own. While there is no set standard on how much time you should spend doing homework in college, a good rule-of-thumb practiced by model students is 3 hours a week per college credit . It doesn’t seem like a lot, until you factor in that the average college student takes on about 15 units per semester. With that in mind, it’s safe to assume that a single, 3-unit college class would usually require 9 hours of homework per week.

But don’t worry, college homework is also different from high school homework in how it’s structured. High school homework usually involves a take-home activity of some kind, where students answer certain questions posed to them. College homework, on the other hand, is more on reading texts that you’ll discuss in your next lecture, studying for exams, and, of course, take-home activities.

Take these averages with a grain of salt, however, as the average number of hours required to do college homework will also depend on your professor, the type of class you’re attending, what you’re majoring in, and whether or not you have other activities (like laboratory work or field work) that would compensate for homework.

Do Students Do College Homework On the Weekends?

Again, based on the average number we provided above, and again, depending on numerous other factors, it’s safe to say that, yes, you would have to complete a lot of college homework on the weekends.

Using the average given above, let’s say that a student does 9 hours of homework per week per class. A typical semester would involve 5 different classes (each with 3 units), which means that a student would be doing an average of 45 hours of homework per week. That would equal to around 6 hours of homework a day, including weekends.

That might seem overwhelming, but again: college homework is different from high school homework in that it doesn’t always involve take-home activities. In fact, most of your college homework (but again, depending on your professor, your major, and other mitigating factors) will probably involve doing readings and writing essays. Some types of college homework might not even feel like homework, as some professors encourage inter-personal learning by requiring their students to form groups and discuss certain topics instead of doing take-home activities or writing papers. Again, lab work and field work (depending on your major) might also make up for homework.

Remember: this is all relative. Some people read fast and will find that 3 hours per unit per week is much too much time considering they can finish a reading in under an hour.The faster you learn how to read, the less amount of time you’ll need to devote to homework.

College homework is difficult, but it’s also manageable. This is why you see a lot of study groups in college, where your peers will establish a way for everyone to learn on a collective basis, as this would help lighten the mental load you might face during your college life. There are also different strategies you can develop to master your time management skills, all of which will help you become a more holistic person once you leave college.

So, yes, your weekends will probably be chock-full of schoolwork, but you’ll need to learn how to manage your time in such a way that you’ll be able to do your homework and socialize, but also have time to develop your other skills and/or talk to family and friends.

College Homework Isn’t All That Bad, Though

Sure, you’ll probably have time for parties and joining a fraternity/sorority, even attend those mythical college keggers (something that the person who invented college probably didn’t have in mind). But I hate to break it to you: those are going to be few and far in between. But here’s a consolation, however: you’re going to be studying something you’re actually interested in.

All of those hours spent in the library, writing down papers, doing college homework? It’s going to feel like a minute because you’re doing something you actually love doing. And if you fear that you’ll be missing out, don’t worry: all those people that you think are attending those parties aren’t actually there because they, too, will be busy studying!

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9 Ways to Finish Homework in College Even When You Don't Feel Like It

• Student Success

Do you put the “pro” in procrastinate?

In truth, we’ve all experienced how difficult it feels just to start. So we tend to ignore it and focus on something more fun instead. But then, before we realize, a project that at first seemed manageable now appears next to impossible to complete. 

So we go into a deadline-induced panic. 

Even if you think you work well under stress and pressure in college, you probably still feel the overwhelming sense of anxiety that accompanies procrastination, whether or not you meet that looming deadline.

But if you want to break your procrastination habit, you can. It’s fixable. All you need is a solid support system and a few clever productivity tactics to keep your self-discipline and focus in check.

So instead of falling into the frantic last-minute cycle again , use this list of tools and strategies to push ahead and finish what needs to be done.  

1. Play That Music

Music boosts your energy and keeps you alert. So if you are distracted by the slightest of sounds in a usually quiet atmosphere, music can drown out any spontaneous interruptions. It also has a powerful effect on your mood and recall. When you select the right song to play while studying, writing a paper or posting in the discussion board, the tune can trigger your memory.

2. Find a Study Buddy

If you find it difficult to sit down and create a study guide for your next exam, team up with a few classmates to draft a master study guide. Assign each person a section to work on. Perhaps one of your teammates has a better understanding of the material in a specific section and can help you better grasp the concepts. Then, combine everyone’s work for a complete and comprehensive guide.  

3. Grab Your Phone

Use your smartphone to your advantage. Make use of those awkward segments of time throughout the day when you may have a 10-minute opening. Waiting for your kid to finish soccer practice? Have a couple minutes before your meeting starts? Study anytime by loading your notes onto your phone or turning them into digital, on-the-go flashcards.

4. Make It Fun

It’s ok to face it - we avoid tasks because they seem boring. The easiest way to fix this is to make those tasks fun. For example, if you are writing a paper, invite a friend who might have their own work to do to join you at a coffee shop. Or recruit your kids to quiz you on your study material. Your kids will love helping (and they’ll learn something too!).

5. Take Advantage of Web Apps

Writing apps like Hemingway and Grammarly can ease the process of writing papers by helping you write more clearly. Think of these apps as your own personal writing coach. As you write, the app identifies hard to read sentences, as well as awkward phrasing, and promotes better word choices.

6. Set an Alarm

Not just any alarm. One programmed to tell you what you need to do and how it will impact your day. Think, “start working on your paper now and you’ll be able to go to a movie.” If you ignore that one, then set another saying, “if you start your paper now, you can watch an hourlong drama,” and so on. This type of self-reward system can help you better manage your time and still fulfill your wants later on.   

7. Recruit a Supervisor

Being accountable to someone is often the drive we need to kick us into gear. Use a similar tactic to ensure your schoolwork is done on time. Ask someone to check on your progress periodically to assure you’re staying on task. This someone can be your spouse, a friend or even your children. Choose wisely, though. You want someone who is serious about helping and won’t try to bother you while you are working. Your teenaged son or daughter will probably be very good at checking up on you and keeping you on task. Maybe even too good.

8. Do Your Least Favorite Work First

When you do your least favorite work first, you will increase your confidence and decrease your stress levels. And, naturally, avoid procrastination later on. Finishing the largest item on your to-do list will give you the productivity boost you need to do other assignments you may have pushed aside.

9. Change Your Perspective

Are things just not right in your usual study space ? Or do you just not like it anymore? Maybe it’s too loud, too quiet, too dark or just too hot. Consider making a change. Try working in your local coffee shop, in a community library or a nearby park. The change in scenery and perspective will impact your productivity for the better.

Written by Thomas Edison State University

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Your Guide to Conquering College Coursework

Getting good grades in college can be a lot tougher than in high school. For many students, it requires building new skills and establishing new habits. Learning those skills now—before starting college—will help make your transition as easy and as successful as possible.

Mary Sharp Emerson

The transition from high school to college is a big one. Meeting new friends, living on your own, and creating your own schedule are just some of the new, exciting challenges that await you.   

In the excitement of starting a new life on campus, college coursework can sometimes become a second priority.

However, adjusting to college coursework is often the biggest challenge of all. Even the best students may be surprised at how difficult college courses are. The subject matter is more complex. The workload is larger. And instructors’ standards are higher.

Mastering college-level courses requires a new level of independence, advocacy, engagement, and time management.

You can prepare yourself to succeed before you even get to campus. Identifying the skills you need, and building those skills into established habits, will help make your transition to college academics, and college life, easier, less stressful, and more successful.

Be engaged in your college coursework

College courses require your full attention and active participation.

And the more you engage with your teachers, teaching assistants, and classmates both in and out of the classroom, the easier it will be for you to succeed in that class.

The importance of active listening

Active listening is one of the most critical parts of engaging in a course, according to Gina Neugebauer, assistant director of Harvard Summer School’s Secondary School Program.

“Professors and teaching assistants can tell if you’re actively listening. They notice if you’re taking notes and making eye contact. They also notice if you’re distracted by your phone or computer,” notes Neugebauer.

Active listening means not checking your social media accounts or texting friends during class.

It also means really giving the instructor and your classmates your full attention.

It sounds easy in theory but it takes practice. It can be tough to not think about all the work you have or your next party. But the more you work on actively listening, the easier it will be to not get distracted and miss important information in class.

Different ways to actively participate

Beyond active listening, there are many ways to participate in a course. And you can tailor your level of engagement to your personality and comfort level.

“It’s all about gauging what you’re comfortable with,” says Neugebauer.

“You may not be the person who raises their hand all the time but you actively respond to online discussion posts, for example. You may not feel comfortable talking in front of hundreds of students in a large lecture hall but you take advantage of TA office hours and email the instructor with questions.”

But don’t be afraid to push yourself if you aren’t someone who usually speaks up in class.

It’s ok to start small. Work on raising your hand in small seminars or discussion sections. As you gain confidence, you’ll find it gets easier to answer questions and share your opinions.

Build independence and advocate for yourself

In college, you are responsible for your own success. You will need to advocate for yourself and know when—and how—to ask for help. That requires a level of independence that you may not have needed in high school.

The good news is that instructors and teaching assistants want to help you.

“Instructors, on the whole, enjoy hearing from you. And they’d rather hear from you right from the start, rather than have you struggle on your own for three weeks,” says Neugebauer.

If you have a question about an assignment, send your instructor an email. Are you upset about a grade you got on a recent test? Visit your instructor or TA during office hours to discuss what went wrong and how you can improve.

But remember, says Neugebauer, professors are busy and you are only one of many students.

“Your email should include your full name, what course you’re taking, and a brief description of your question or concern. And you cannot expect an answer at 2 a.m. because that’s when you’re studying. When you reach out to an instructor, give them 24-48 hours to respond.”

And remember, always be respectful and non-confrontational.

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Don’t be afraid to seek help

If you have excelled in high school without extra help, you might be tempted to persevere on your own.

In college, Neugebauer points out, asking for help is the norm.

“Once you get into your undergraduate program, you’ll find that almost everyone has, at some point, asked a TA for extra tutoring, gone to a tutoring center, or a writing or math center for extra help. It’s part of the learning process of an undergraduate program,” Neugebauer says.

Colleges have a variety of support systems in place to help you succeed.

TA office hours are a great place to start if you find yourself struggling with a specific concept or assignment. Peer tutoring programs enable you to learn from students who have been through the course themselves. Academic coaches can help with more general study tips or exam-related stress.

The key is seeking out help proactively, before you get too far behind. As the courses become more difficult, catching up becomes increasingly difficult.

Build time management techniques

Balancing everything that comes with life on a college campus can be difficult for many incoming college students.

“The biggest challenge we see facing high school students who are trying to adapt to college life is overcommitment. Students want to engage in every activity, a full course load, and even sometimes a part-time job. They don’t schedule enough time for self-care, quiet time, doing laundry, and plenty of study time. All those things take time,” Neugebauer says.

Good study habits and time management are key to avoiding the stress that comes from getting overcommitted.

Neugebauer recommends getting into the habit of keeping an accurate and up-to-date calendar.

“The best thing I can recommend is a calendar, such as Google Calendar. Use it to schedule everything: your class, your lunch time, time at the gym. It may seem counterintuitive, but work on scheduling literally everything, even sleep.”

Be sure to include assignments, tests, and other deadlines, as well as office hours for your instructors, TAs, and academic coaches.

Use your calendar to block off dedicated study time. And once you schedule it, stick to it! Avoid the temptation to procrastinate or use that time to hang out, play video games, or scroll on your phone.

Your calendar should also include dedicated time for self-care.

Regular mealtimes, good exercise habits, and a full night’s sleep are not only critical for your physical and mental health. You’ll also be surprised at how much they contribute to your academic success.

Challenge yourself as you engage in college coursework

Getting outside your comfort zone is a critical part of preparing yourself for the exciting challenges that await you in college.

“Being uncomfortable allows for growth. It means saying to yourself, ‘this is new. I want to try it. I want to see how it feels.’ This is all about adapting to a new environment but also examining yourself as a person,” says Neugebauer.

Taking on a new challenge—regardless of the ultimate outcome—builds resilience, mental toughness, and confidence, all of which you will need to succeed in your college courses.

But, warns Neugebauer, it’s also important to know your limitations.

“That uncomfortable feeling should be manageable. It should be a challenge but not so challenging that you feel panicked and wake up in cold sweats every night. It should be something that gets you a little nervous but also excited about what you’re involved in every day.”

However you decide to challenge yourself, it’s never too early to start if college is in your future. The sooner you start identifying and mastering the skills you need in college, the better prepared you’ll be to succeed right from day one.

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College can still be rigorous without a lot of homework

Senior Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Southern California

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How hard should it be to earn a college degree?

When the book “ Academically Adrift ” appeared in 2011, it generated widespread concern that college was not effectively educating students and preparing them for today’s world. Among other things, authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa claimed that most colleges were not rigorous or demanding, in part because college students were not reading and writing enough in order to build their critical thinking skills. But is it really how much work students are assigned that makes college rigorous and helps them learn?

As a scholar of higher education , I have taken a close look at college students’ academic experiences and outcomes for several years. Some people define rigor as how many pages a student reads or how many pages a student writes. But in a 2021 peer-reviewed study that I published with colleagues John Braxton and Ernie Pascarella , I found that if they do that, they might miss key elements of what it takes to help students develop critical thinking skills and become lifelong learners. They also might create an unnecessary burden for students who have other demands on their time.

What is rigor?

In education, academic rigor tends to be defined in two different ways : as a workload that is demanding and difficult or as learning experiences that challenge and support students to think more deeply.

Given the importance of critical thinking, the way rigor is defined makes a big difference in terms of the ways that the general public – as well as administrators, policymakers, journalists and researchers – assess if a college is rigorous. It also makes a difference in terms of faculties’ expectations for students, the types of classroom activities they use and the assignments they give.

In other words, if rigor means workload, then students who spend a lot of time studying should become better critical thinkers. In contrast, if rigor means academic challenge, then students who practice higher-order thinking skills, such as analysis and evaluation , during class, on assignments and during exams should become better critical thinkers.

That’s why my study examines each definition of rigor – workload and academic challenge – in terms of helping students develop critical thinking skills. The study also looks at those definitions of rigor in relation to two related dimensions of lifelong learning. One is reading and writing for pleasure, and the other is the habit of thinking deeply and critically about things.

The college difference

The study included about 2,800 students who attended one of 46 four-year colleges in the U.S. between 2006 and 2012. These students took part in the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education , which was a large, longitudinal study of how college experiences affected outcomes associated with a liberal arts education. They completed surveys and tests at three different points during college: at the beginning of their first year, at the end of their first year and at the end of their fourth year.

In these surveys, students reported their course workload, including how many books they read, pages they wrote and hours they spent studying for class. They also reported how much their courses challenged them to engage in higher-order thinking. Faculty ask students to practice higher-order thinking when they ask challenging questions in class and give assignments that ask students to analyze information or form an argument.

Since the Wabash National Study measured students’ critical thinking and lifelong learning skills at multiple timepoints, my study looked at how much students developed these skills in relation to their workload and the academic challenge of their classes. Of course, students who are motivated to get good grades may be more likely to develop these skills. And lots of other college experiences, like interacting with faculty outside of class or being in an honors program, might also make a difference. My study accounts for these factors in order to better understand the unique influence of each definition of rigor.

What matters

Here’s what we found.

In the first year of college, higher-order thinking was related to an increase in both dimensions of lifelong learning: reading and writing for pleasure and the tendency to think deeply. Higher-order thinking was not related to development of critical thinking skills. Workload was not related to students’ critical thinking or either dimension of lifelong learning.

Across four years of college, higher-order thinking was related to an increase in students’ critical thinking skills and both dimensions of lifelong learning. Workload was related to only one dimension of lifelong learning: reading and writing for pleasure. This relationship was driven primarily by the amount of reading students did, rather than the amount of writing they did or the amount of time they spent studying.

Perhaps most importantly, my study suggests that students learn important critical thinking and lifelong learning skills because of challenging class experiences regardless of the workload. In other words, college can help students be better critical thinkers and lifelong learners without requiring them to spend a lot of time studying.

[ You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter .]

Implications for colleges

This study has implications for how courses and colleges are assessed as being rigorous. It also has implications for how faculty teach, as it suggests that they should create courses that engage students in higher-order thinking, rather than asking them to complete long reading and writing assignments.

These implications matter particularly for students from low-income backgrounds, who are more likely to work full-time during college. Low-income students are also more likely to commute to campus and have family responsibilities .

Because of these responsibilities, students from low-income backgrounds often have less time to dedicate to homework compared to students from wealthier backgrounds who live on campus and who don’t work as many hours. This creates an opportunity gap in students’ ability to be successful. A 2018 report from the Pell Institute shows that low-income students graduate at much lower rates than students from higher-income backgrounds.

If campuses want students from low-income backgrounds to graduate at the same rate as their peers, then it is important that these students have a reasonable workload in their courses so that they don’t have to choose between college and their other responsibilities.

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Take Control of Homework

Don't let it control you..

Although very few students love homework, it does serve a purpose. Homework helps you:

• Reinforce what you've learned during the day.
• Build study habits that are essential in college.
• Prepare for your classes.
• Get a sense of progress.

College life involves a lot of adjustments for students. Will you have homework in college? Yes. And it can be one of the most daunting tasks you face there. Out-of-the-classroom learning is part of the college experience and essential for academic success. The good news is that learning some homework tips now will make it easier to do college homework later.

Set the Mood.

Create a good study area with everything you need (e.g., a calculator). If you don't have a quiet place at home, try your local library.

Know Where to Begin.

Make a list of everything you need to do. Note all deadlines. Do the more challenging assignments first so you don't have to face them at the end.

Study at the Same Time Every Day.

Even if you don't have homework every night, use the time to review notes. If sitting down to work is part of your everyday routine, you'll approach it with less dread. Also, you'll become a pro at using time productively.

Keep Things in Perspective.

Know how much weight each assignment or test carries. Use your time accordingly.

Get More Involved.

Keep your mind from wandering by taking notes, underlining sections, discussing topics with others, or relating your homework to something you're studying in another class.

Organize the Information.

People process information in different ways. Some people like to draw pictures or charts to digest information, while others prefer to read aloud or make detailed outlines. Try to find the methods that work best for you. Ask your teacher for recommendations if you're having trouble.

Take Advantage of Any Free Time.

If you have a study period or a long bus ride, use the time to review notes, prepare for an upcoming class, or start your homework.

Study with a Friend.

Get together with friends and classmates to quiz each other, compare notes, and predict test questions. Consider joining a study group.

Communicate.

If you have concerns about the amount or type of homework, talk to your family, teachers, or counselor. They can help you understand how much time you need to allot for homework and how to manage your tasks.

Celebrate Your Achievements.

Reward yourself for hitting milestones or doing something unusually well.

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In contrast to the academic requirements of high school, college courses present a much heavier, more consistent workload. And with everything else that college students have to manage -- jobs, personal life, relationships, physical health, cocurricular obligations -- it can sometimes seem like getting your homework done is an impossible feat. At the same time, however,  not  getting your work done is a recipe for disaster. So, what tips and tricks can you use to get your homework done in college?

Tips for Successfully Doing College Homework

Use these tips to create a process that works for you and your personal study style.

Use a Time Management System

Put all major assignments and their due dates in your time management system . A key part of staying on top of your homework is knowing what's coming; no one, after all, wants to realize on Tuesday that they have a major midterm on Thursday. To avoid surprising yourself, make sure all of your major homework assignments and their due dates are documented in your calendar. That way, you won't inadvertently sabotage your own success simply because you've mismanaged your time.

Schedule Homework Time

Schedule times to do homework each week, and keep those appointments. Without designated time for addressing your to-dos, you're more likely to cram at the last minute, which adds to your anxiety levels.

By putting homework on your calendar, you'll have the time allocated in your already-too-busy schedule, you'll reduce your stress by knowing when, exactly, your homework will be done, and you'll be better able to enjoy whatever else you have planned since you'll know your homework is already taken care of.

Sneak in Your Homework

Use small increments of time whenever possible. You know that 20-minute bus ride you have to and from campus every day? Well, that's 40 minutes a day, 5 days a week which means that if you did some reading during the ride, you'd get more than 3 hours of homework done during your commute.

Those little increments can add up: 30 minutes between classes here, 10 minutes waiting for a friend there. Be smart about sneaking in small bits of homework so that you can conquer the bigger assignments piece by piece.

You Can't Always Get It All Done

Understand that you can't always get all your homework done. One of the biggest skills to learn in college is how to gauge what you  can't  get done. Because sometimes, there really is only so many hours in a day, and the basic laws of physics mean you can't accomplish everything on your to-do list.

If you just can't get all your homework done, make some smart decisions about how to choose what to do and what to leave behind. Are you doing great in one of your classes, and skipping the reading one week shouldn't hurt too much? Are you failing another and definitely need to focus your efforts there?

Hit the Reset Button

Don't get caught up in the get-caught-up trap. If you fall behind on your homework , it's easy to think -- and hope -- that you'll be able to catch up. So you'll set a plan to catch up, but the more you try to catch up, the more you fall behind. If you're falling behind on your reading and are feeling overwhelmed, give yourself permission to start anew.

Figure out what you need to get done for your next assignment or class, and get it done. It's easier to cover the material you missed when you're studying for an exam in the future than it is to fall further and further behind right now.

Use Your Resources

Use class and other resources to help make doing your homework more productive and efficient. You might, for example, think that you don't need to go to class because the professor only covers what's already been addressed in the reading. Not true.

You should always go to class -- for a variety of reasons -- and doing so can make your homework load lighter. You'll better understand the material, be better able to absorb the work you do out of class, be better prepared for upcoming exams (thereby saving you studying time and improving your academic performance), and overall just have a better mastery of the material. Additionally, use your professor's office hours or time in an academic support center to reinforce what you've learned through your homework assignments. Doing homework shouldn't just be a to-do item on your list; it should be an essential part of your college academic experience.

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Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, the 13 hardest college majors to challenge yourself.

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What are the hardest college majors? You might assume it's all those complicated STEM majors—and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong.

In this article, we look at the various factors normally used to determine whether a major is hard before going over the 13 most difficult majors based on how many hours students typically spend each week preparing for classes . We also give you a few tips for finding the right college major for you.

What Makes a College Major Hard?

Before we introduce the hardest college majors, let's clarify exactly what can make a major hard.

The problem with this concept is that there's no single, objective criterion we can use . What's difficult for one student might come totally naturally to the next person.

As a result, what are considered the hardest college majors can vary a lot depending on the student —specifically, on where your natural strengths and passions lie. If you're not particularly good at a subject and/or don't have any deep passion for or interest in it, that major will likely be harder for you.

By contrast, if you're extremely skilled at a subject and are committed to studying it, then you will probably find that major easier than you would other fields you have less experience with and/or are less interested in pursuing.

What I'm essentially trying to say here is that any college major can be hard based on how you define the concept of "hard."

Now, are there any objective factors that can make a college major difficult for students?

Most studies look at one critical factor: the total amount of time students spend preparing for classes in their major(s). The longer students spend doing homework for their major classes and studying for exams, the harder that major is considered to be, objectively speaking.

This is the primary criterion used by most websites and surveys, including the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) , which released data in 2016 that detailed the number of hours each week college students typically spent preparing for class.

According to the survey, "preparing for class" encompasses anything from doing homework and studying for exams to reading and writing .

Some websites and organizations consider majors hard based on additional factors, such as how many all-nighters students pulled or how high or low the average GPA for a particular major is (in other words, the lower the GPA, the harder that major is thought to be). Another potential factor to consider on a school level is how many students graduate with a particular major in four years; while there may be other factors at play, majors that tend to take students longer than the average bachelor's degree timespan to finish might be harder (or at the very least, more time-consuming).

Introducing the 13 Hardest College Majors

Even though what majors are hard for you will depend on what you personally find interesting and easier to do, there are some college majors out there that often require more study time and have more homework, making them objectively harder than other majors .

Below are the 13 hardest majors based on 2016 NSSE data shared with The Tab .

#13: Chemistry

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 18.06

Chemistry majors spend about two and a half hours per day preparing for class each week.

These students study the function, composition, and behavior of matter, and reactions between different forms of matter. They also look at energy. Usual classes required for the major include general chemistry, physics, biology, organic chemistry, calculus, and statistics.

#12: Neuroscience

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 18.08

Neuroscience majors spend 18 hours a week preparing for class, or just slightly more than what chemistry majors spend.

This academic field is all about the human nervous system, including its development, structure, and role, with focus given to the brain and its cognitive properties. As a neuroscience major, you can expect to take classes in psychology, biology, calculus, chemistry, and physics.

#11: Mechanical Engineering

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 18.11

Coming in at #11 is mechanical engineering, whose students spend 18.11 hours preparing for class every week.

As an academic discipline, mechanical engineering entails the design, creation, manufacturing, and analysis of mechanical systems — or, more broadly, anything in motion. Course topics for this major generally include physics, calculus, chemistry, dynamics and controls, thermal sciences, and design and manufacturing.

#10: Petroleum Engineering

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 18.41

Petroleum engineering majors spend around 18 hours and 24 minutes a week studying and doing homework.

In this engineering major, students learn all about the extraction and production of oil and natural gas. Classes required for a program in petroleum engineering can include properties of petroleum fluids, energy and the environment, reservoir geomechanics, calculus, geology, chemistry, physics, and petrophysics.

#9: Bioengineering

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 18.43

At #9 on our list is bioengineering. Students majoring in this spend just under 18 and a half hours per week preparing for courses.

Also called biological engineering, bioengineering integrates biological and engineering principles to create usable products, such as medical devices and diagnostic equipment. Classes needed for bioengineering majors can vary depending on the track you choose but typically include statistics, chemistry, biology, computer programming, biochemistry, and science of materials.

#8: Biochemistry or Biophysics

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 18.49

Biochemistry or biophysics majors come in 8th place for hardest major, with an average of 18 and a half hours spent getting ready for class every week.

Students majoring in biochemistry, or biological chemistry, look closely at the chemical processes and substances in living organisms. Biophysics is similar : it involves using the main principles of physics to study organisms and biological phenomena. Basically, the two fields are a lot alike and really only differ in their approaches.

As a biochemistry/biophysics major, you'll likely have to take classes in biology, chemistry, physics, and math, as well as specialized classes that cover topics such as genetics, cell biology, physiology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology, and computing.

#7: Astronomy

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 18.59

Spending slightly more than 18 and a half hours a week preparing for class are astronomy majors, who currently rank #7 for hardest college majors.

Astronomy entails the study of celestial objects (such as planets, asteroids, and stars) and related phenomena like supernovae and black holes. Students in this major typically must take classes in physics, calculus, computer science, astrophysics, cosmology, and planetary geology.

#6: Physics

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 18.62

Like astronomy majors, physics majors spend a little more than 18 hours and 30 minutes per week preparing for courses.

In a physics major, students learn about the movement and properties of matter through time and space, as well as the concepts of force and energy. Common topics covered in classes are quantum physics, electricity, magnetism, vibrations and waves, thermodynamics, and gravity.

#5: Cell and Molecular Biology

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 18.67

We are now entering the top five hardest majors! Cell and molecular biology majors devote about 18 hours and 40 minutes a week to class preparation.

An interdisciplinary field, cell and molecular biology combines chemistry and biology, which allows us to analyze cellular processes and understand the function and structure of life forms. Required courses usually include chemistry, biology, math, biochemistry, ecology, marine molecular ecology, and immunology.

#4: Biomedical Engineering

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 18.82

Undergraduates majoring in biomedical engineering typically spend a little less than 19 hours per week preparing for classes.

A subfield of bioengineering (see #9 above), biomedical engineering entails using the principles of engineering and biology to create quality products specifically for use in medicine and health care. Biomedical engineering majors take courses in chemistry, calculus, physics, engineering design, electric circuits, thermodynamics, and statistics.

#3: Aero and Astronautical Engineering

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 19.24

At #3 on the list of the hardest college majors is aero and astronautical engineering. Students in this major normally spend around 19 hours and 15 minutes a week preparing for class.

Aero and astronautical engineering comprise the two types of aerospace engineering : while aeronautical engineering involves the development of aircraft to use within Earth's atmosphere, astronautical engineering entails the development of spacecraft to use outside the atmosphere.

Students in these majors usually take classes in aerodynamics, gas dynamics, aircraft/spacecraft structures, aircraft/spacecraft propulsion, and space system design.

#2: Chemical Engineering

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 19.66

On to the top two! The second-hardest college major and hardest engineering major is chemical engineering; students in this field spend an average of 19 hours and 40 minutes a week preparing for class.

Chemical engineering is a broad subset of engineering that involves the design, production, use, and transportation of chemicals. It also entails the operation of chemical plants. Students majoring in chemical engineering take courses in calculus, chemistry, physics, biology, engineering, materials science, kinetics, and transport processes.

#1: Architecture

Average Hours Spent Preparing for Class Each Week: 22.20

Topping this list of the hardest college majors are architect majors, who spend a whopping 22.2 hours a week on average preparing for classes—that's more than two hours more each week than what chemical engineering students spend !

Architecture majors learn how to design and build structures in addition to studying the history and theory behind architecture. Courses needed for this major include calculus, physics, design processes, design theory, history of architecture, urban design, and art history.

How to Find the Right Major for You: 3 Key Factors

These are the hardest college majors based on the amount of preparation they typically require. The real question now is this: which major should you choose ?

This is an important question to think about, both before and while you're in college. So how can you make sure you're choosing the right major for you?

First off, don't be tempted to choose a major simply because of its perceived difficulty . Though it might sound impressive to choose one of the hardest college majors, if you're not passionate about the field or don't want a career in it, it likely won't be worth majoring in.

At the same time, don't avoid one of the most difficult majors purely because it's known as being one of the harder ones . If you're committed to pursuing a career in architecture, for example, then go ahead and major in architecture—don't pick something else just because you're scared of how hard it might be! Most likely, another major simply won't make you happy and you won't feel nearly as fulfilled had you just opted for the major you initially wanted.

Ultimately, there are three key factors you'll want to think about before choosing a major:

• Your interests and passions: If you are not genuinely interested in the major you've chosen, you'll likely lack motivation to keep up with your studies. Pick something that excites you on a deeper level.
• Your abilities: Ability matters because if you can't do something at all or do it well enough to be successful in it, then the major is likely not the one for you. For example, it might not be in your best interest to pursue a major in drawing if you have no experience drawing and aren't particularly skilled at it.
• Your career goals and interests: Although your major doesn't need to directly mirror your career goals, it should be at least somewhat related to your future aspirations. Don't major in biology if you're way more interested in becoming a professional violinist, for instance.

These are the main factors to consider before you commit to a major in college.

Note that it's OK if you're undecided on your major when you start college — not all schools require you to declare a major in your application anyway. Still,  you should definitely take some time to explore your options to help you figure out what your ideal course of study might be.

Recap: What Is the Hardest Major in College?

When it comes to the most difficult majors, what one student might consider difficult can vary a lot from what another student might consider difficult. This is because the difficulty of a college major ultimately depends on each person's individual interests and abilities .

Still, this hasn't stopped people from trying to come up with lists of the hardest college majors.

A 2016 study called the NSSE surveyed US college students, asking how many hours they normally spend preparing for classes each week. The study then divided these answers up by major to give a rough idea as to which majors generally required more preparation time than others.

We've used the results of this study to put together a list of the 13 hardest college majors based on the average number of hours students spent preparing for class:

When it comes to finding the right major for you, don't choose (or avoid!) majors simply based on their perceived difficulty . Instead, try to take into account your passions and interests, your abilities, and your career goals. These are what will help you figure out your ideal major!

What's Next?

You know what the hardest majors are, but what about the easiest majors? We looked at average GPAs to come up with a list of the 14 easiest majors .

Which majors are most likely to earn you lots of money? Get the answer to which majors are highest paying and which fields are the best for finding a job .

What are the worst majors in terms of salaries and employment? Check out what we've found in our in-depth post .

What are the most unusual majors? Learn more about which colleges have more out-there majors and which let you design your own path.

Hannah received her MA in Japanese Studies from the University of Michigan and holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California. From 2013 to 2015, she taught English in Japan via the JET Program. She is passionate about education, writing, and travel.

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Search the site, search suggestions, “is harvard hard” and other commonly asked work-related questions.

Although we often blog about fun and exciting things happening around campus, it is also important to remember that students at Harvard spend a lot of time on their studies.

Coursework is a central part of the Harvard experience, just as making friends and participating in extracurricular activities are. As classes begin winding down for the semester and finals quickly approach, I thought I’d take this opportunity to answer some commonly asked work-related questions.  

“How much time do you spend in class?”

This really varies depending on your concentration and the types of classes you are taking. For example, my English class meets for 3 hours of lecture plus 1 hour of discussion section per week, whereas the second semester organic chemistry class I’m taking in the spring will meet for 3 hours of class plus 5 hours of lab/discussion section each week. Typically, most students spend between 14 to 20 hours in class per week, but this can vary from person to person and semester to semester. To make sure that students can handle their schedules, all students have to meet with their academic adviser before signing up for classes to make sure that they are setting themselves up for a balanced course load each semester.

“What type of ‘homework’ do you get?”

There are two main types of classes at Harvard: problem set (“pset”) classes and essay classes. Problem sets are often given out in math or science courses, and they consist of various problems that you have to solve (like a set of math problems, for example). Essay classes typically consist mainly of a few written papers throughout the semester. This is just a general breakdown: many classes have a combination of essays and problem sets, or have different assignments like online quizzes or online discussion board posts. In addition, many classes assign readings outside of class—it’s important to stay on track!

“What are finals like?”

After classes end, there is one week called “Reading Week” before final exams begin. Reading Week is designed to give students the time they need to study, write final papers, and complete final projects (depending on the class). Each class that does have a final exam has a 3-hour time slot in which the exam is given, and there are only two possible time slots per day (so you are never in the position where you are taking four exams in one day). Most final exams are cumulative and cover all of the material learned over the course of the semester.

“Is Harvard hard?”

Yes, I believe that Harvard is a challenging academic environment. Of course some things will be easier for some students to grasp than others, but I think one of the great things about being here is that everyone pushes themselves to do their own personal best work. It is difficult but manageable, and there are tons of resources and support systems to help you get through it.

Well, looks like it’s time to get back to studying!

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Is College Hard?

Last Updated on April 9, 2024.

Studying toward a high school diploma or for a GED is totally different from how students are expected to learn in college. Everything is set totally differently than it is in K-12.

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College students are generally expected to spend some 2 to 3 hours out of the classroom for every single hour they’re spending inside a classroom on homework, self-study, tutoring, and so on.

And because a full classroom study load is usually 15 credit hours in semester systems, students will need to work some 30 to 45 hours outside of their classrooms and some 45–60 hours in total.

And when you’ve earned a GED®, it might be a bit harder for you to keep on working and studying in a very disciplined way, wouldn’t you think?

If you are looking to earn your GED fast to get into college soon, start out with our free online GED classes and practice tests. If this way of online study is fine with you, continue with Cnsego’s accredited program and get all set for the real thing in no time.

Are all college students spending this sort of hours for all classes? Well, the answer, of course, is no. And if they would, that’s no guarantee as well that’s sufficient for them to be successful in a class either.

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There are students who may be successful by studying maybe 12 or 16 hours for some exam, even when the class is hard for them.

Well, hard work isn’t always resulting in its own reward, yet on the other hand, nothing of serious value was certainly ever achieved without a lot of hard work.

But, of course, it’s not only the effort that counts. Efforts are great, but they’re just beginnings. Suppose you’ve worked on a paper or a project for ten hours in one single sitting.

Well, that’s definitely hard work, but it has nothing to do with discipline. With discipline, I mean working, for example, two hours per night for five consecutive nights.

Table of Contents

• 1 Self-Discipline is Hard To Learn
• 2 Much More Freedom
• 3 Don’t Procrastinate
• 4 Keep Up with Homework

Self-Discipline is Hard To Learn

For most students, discipline is pretty hard to learn, generally because most students are younger than 25 years of age, and their prefrontal cortex hasn’t come to full growth yet.

Yes, the brain keeps on growing, forming, and changing, and the prefrontal cortex is the section that relates to judgment.

By studying disciplined,  you will feel less pressure, and you probably will end up with a better grade as well without running the risk of failing a class in college.

Well, the first year in college may be pretty overwhelming. Going from classes of 15 to 25 students to lecture halls that are packed with hundreds of students may cause some difficulty for you to focus.

It may surely seem much more work for you to deal with the responsibility of keeping up with your homework by yourself.  You need to check the course syllabus on a daily basis, and you’re required to work independently using textbooks outside of lectures.

Much More Freedom

All this is so different from dealing with your day-to-day routine, like doing worksheets for high school. Then again, the beauty of college is that you’ve got so much more freedom to attend classes that you’re really interested in.

You can find it well worth putting extra effort into these classes, and some assignments may, therefore, not feel like a lot of work because it genuinely relates to more interesting assignments, and you’ll learn more in your specific academic field.

There are people who say that college is so much harder than studying for a high school or GED diploma. They’ll be warning you to brace yourself and avoid bad grades, and they’ll tell you about very late nights that you’ll be studying!

But there’s absolutely no need to stress about the difficulty level of college classes! If you still need to get your GED, check out these free online GED practice tests , a great help to get you on your way to college!

The fact of the matter is that everybody has some sort of different opinion. There are also quite a few people who say that their high school years were more difficult than their freshman years of college.

Your difficulty level experience is obviously also depending on which classes you took in high school and which classes you’ve chosen to take for your college education.

Don’t Procrastinate

Then there are quite a few students who just never seem to be able to get rid of their procrastination tendency. Often, these students are still keeping up with their favorite Netflix series, will not forget to take their usual afternoon nap, or never look into their textbooks until a few days before an exam.

Well, sure, it’s totally fine, and it is even recommended to take a break every once in a while to engage in something fun; students should really keep a sharp focus in college and keep up with their classes.

There will be times that it’s hard to stay focused on a lecture, especially when your professor is hard to understand or boring. In those cases, students may well be tempted to switch to Facebook or play a game on their phones.

The fact of the matter is that, unfortunately, you’ll have professors or classes that are less interesting for you than others. Many students ask us if the GED allows for a college education, and the answer is simply yes. The GED is equivalent to a common high school diploma!

If you don’t hold a high school or GED diploma, make sure you pass the GED test quickly, you can get started with our free online GED classes, right now.

Keep in mind that when your textbooks are well-written or when you’re good at finding study material online, you may very well be able to learn all by yourself about academic concepts by following online intro-level academic courses.

Keep Up with Homework

Ensure to keep up regularly with homework and class readings, though, and don’t shy away from collaborating with peers and/or friends or asking for help when needed. This will definitely help you to earn your bachelor’s degree in a timely manner!

How difficult your college class is will depend, for a large part, on the professor who’s teaching it. If you have a professor who’s writing tests that are generally impossible to score well on, then there isn’t that much you can do if you are preparing for his or her tests.

You just make sure you know the material as well as you can without stressing if you miss out on something in the test since chances are that most other students also wouldn’t know the correct answer or solution.

So, in general, you may say that college classes are harder than the classes you took in high school. The topics are far more complicated, the learning processes are faster and more complex, and the self-teaching and self-learning expectations are far higher.

On the other hand, college classes don’t necessarily need to be harder to perform well in. You need to get used to the right mindset and learn to study effectively and independently, and develop your time-management skills.

There’s absolutely no need to get sleep-deprived during nights leading up to an exam, and it is important to keep a positive, constructive attitude and utilize your school’s resources.

Sure, you’ll need to put in more effort at college than you were used to in high school, but if you work hard, you’ll soon get accustomed to the study schedules required in college, and you may very well even feel less stressful than you did in high school!

AHHH! What's college homework like?

<p>I’ve wondered just how hard the homework assignments are, or if there’s even any… I’ve hear stories about getting used to writing 10 paged to 30 paged research papers regularly to doing absolutely in class. What’s the average homework load like? How does homework differ if you’re going for a BS instead of a BA? Do certain classes have reputations for giving out unending amounts of homework? Any of those ridiculously easy fill-in-the-blank worksheets?</p>

<p>AHHH! There is none. Almost nothing is required of you except for taking tests. Everything is voluntary… keep in mind it is practice for the class material.</p>

<p>Free will rulez!!!11</p>

<p>I do all practice just because I can.</p>

<p>I’m a liberal arts student on the quarter system. College doesn’t really have “homework” as you’re thinking about it. Generally, you’ll be responsible for preparing (reading and studying) on average, I’d guess, a few hundred pages per week per class. Your grade will probably be based on a few tests and sometimes quizzes and a few papers. Some classes are entirely based on these papers. The longer ones have approached 20 pages rather than 30, but many are in the 3-10 page range. Some classes are all test-based. It’s really dependent on the teacher.</p>

<p>Many of my classes have been at least mildly writing based, though. I did have a surprising amount of homework in a math class I took, which was typical problem set-work.</p>

<p>I’ve only had anything close to “fill-in-the-blank worksheets” for language classes (to help practice a difficult sort of verb conjugation, for example.)</p>

<p>Obviously it depends on what classes you take. In engineering classes (after first year) you get about 5 weekly assignments that take around 3-5 hours each. In math (after first year) you also get 5 weekly assignments that take about the same amount of time. Physics is again the same deal. First year assignments never took me that long to complete, though.</p>

<p>Other science majors aren’t as hardcore with assigning homework. My chemistry and biology classes didn’t even have assignments.</p>

<p>Oh yes. My friends in the engineering and sciences seemed to have weekly homework of some sort. No idea what the engineers were up to, but the sciencey people had labs to work on.</p>

<p>I’m not sure how your high school works, but at mine, science classes gave out nightly assignments. In college, you do problem sets which are generally due once a week, the idea being that you work on them throughout the week. In college you have to take a more active role managing your time. When it’s the night before a problem set is due and you haven’t started, you’ll wish you did. We’ve all been there. I’m a math major, and my weekly problem sets for math typically take 10-12 hours. I only took two writing-based courses my first year, but the papers I wrote were of the following lengths: [ul][<em>]3 pages (two papers) [</em>]5 pages (two papers) [<em>]8 pages (one paper) [</em>]12 papes (two papers)[/ul]</p>

<p>You get assigned 50 difficult problems per week in science classes, and 1 book + 2 essays a week in humanities classes.</p>

<p>If you fail to complete any assignment, you fail the class. You may redeem yourself in most classes by completing an optional 100-page-single-spaced thesis for extra credit.</p>

<p>I don’t get homework assignments… i make up my own or I fail.</p>

<p>This is definitely true for many classes. I have taken several that didn’t assign homework. But, I wouldn’t have earned As in them had I not done homework on my own.</p>

<p>My engineering/science classes typically had problem sets every week that took 8-12 hours to do. Humanities classes typically had reading and maybe a small writing assignment now and then.</p>

<p>Engineering generally has problem sets/HW every week and some of them take a hella long time…I remember last Fall when I took Analog Electronics the HW took me a whole week to do and sometimes I didn’t even finish…</p>

<p>homework is easy. any major projects/essay require 5 times more research than highschool.</p>

<p>homework is optional for most of my classes. of course, if you don’t do it, you won’t understand anything that is going on and fail all the in-class quizzes and fail your finals beautifully, but yes. it’s OPTIONAL :D</p>

<p>Whoaa! Homework is an option? Now it really isn’t like high school anymore but yeah I guess you really would need to do it so you can better understand the material and thus pass the quizzes/finals beautifully. This is why cheating is heavily condemned. Not so much because its unfair to those who worked their butte off for the grade but because you aren’t learning anything and you will eventually lose when you need that knowledge for the world outside of college.</p>

<p>I wish homework was optional for my classes. I do worse in homework than tests because I hate homework</p>

<p>Sometimes stuyding just isn’t enough. You need to do some practice problems (if math related) or some reading & writing for memoraization (if english related) just so it can stick in your head. But I guess that depends on what kind of a learner you are.</p>

<p>When I first got to college, I was expected to do papers about the same length as the ones I did in high school (5 - 15 pages), but where I’d be held to a higher standard. As I progressed, the papers got longer and the standards got higher. I was also expected to be able to manage with the guidance “It should be as long as you need to answer this question,” which basically meant I didn’t have the “training wheels” of information about how long the professor thought it should take to answer the question. I would suggest that for each class in which you are expected to write a paper, you would google “how to write a ____ paper” with the name of the discipline in the blank. You’ll learn that different fields have different expectations, and if you’ve been very successful writing English papers you may still need to learn something to write a good hisory paper.</p>

<p>I had problem sets. I only had them in math, linguistics and logic classes, where they were fairly easy. If you’re in a different kind of major than I was (and if you need to learn different things than I need to learn even today), you’re probably going to get tougher sets. </p>

<p>The biggest difference for me was the reading. There is a lot of it. You can google “how to read in college” or something and turn up guides for getting the most out of the books you read while going fast. I had one professor who routinely expected you to read 3 or 4 books a week, many of them out of print and only brought up for the first time in the class period in which they were assigned. He was pretty atypical, though. 5 or 6 books per class per semester was more common for me.</p>

<p>When I was in high school, I could just read small chunks of the textbook every day and then not pay attention to what happened in class, and get As. In college, there’s a lot more reading, and not all of it is going to be gone over in class. You’re going to be expected to learn more and more on your own through the assigned reading as you go through – there will be times when none of the reading and none of the subjects covered in the reading are discussed in class, and you’ll have to figure out how it relates.</p>

<p>You may be interested in reading Patrick Allitt’s book “I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student.” Allitt teaches history at Emory, and in the book he discusses one class from beginning to end. I believe it’s out of print, but your library may have it.</p>

<p>You may also be interested in the book “My Freshman Year” by Rebekah Nathan (a pseudonym for Cathy Small at Northern Arizona University). Small, an anthropologist, took a sabbatical, registered as a student at her school, and moved into a dorm to study student life as a participant-observer. There’s a certain amount of controversy about whether this was ethical, etc., and at least some students say she didn’t get things right, but you may find it useful.</p>

<p>Keep in mind that there are a lot of students in the same situation as you and administrators put a lot of pressure on faculty to find some justification for giving almost all of you passing grades. The firing of Steven D. Aird may have driven the point home, but it was hardly the first hint anybody who teaches got.</p>

<p>Of course homework is optional.</p>

<p>Quizzes are optional.</p>

<p>Papers are optional.</p>

<p>Exams are optional.</p>

<p>As one of my teachers used to point out, in college, everything is optional.</p>

<p>But if you make certain choices, then you’re also choosing to get an F.</p>

<p>It depends on the class and the school. </p>

<p>In my math class, we had assignments due 2-3x a week (mondays assignment was due wednesday, wednesday’s was due friday, friday was a quiz or an assignment due monday). It was done online and consisted of 10-15 problems. We then had an optional practice problems, which I wish I would have done because they would have helped me a ton even though we never turned them in! Lesson=do optional practice problems.</p>

<p>In my chemistry class, we had optional practice problems. They were never turned in, but it was stupid of you if you didn’t do them. We also were supposed to read the chapters in the book. It was like 1-2 chapters a week.</p>

<p>In other classes, we had reading assignments in the textbook that went along with our lesson. You could get by class if you didn’t read them, but you still should.</p>

<p>In my English classes, we had to read the chapters in the textbook (I never did because I already know how to write papers and all that stuff) and then we had to read stories. The stories were important because we had discussions, quizzes, and essays based off of them.</p>

<p>The length of papers is generally never a good measure of their ‘difficulty’. Often a 2 page paper is much harder to write than a 10 page paper… it depends on what the assignment is</p>

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9 Tips for Dealing With Difficult Homework

• Post by: Professor Conquer
• Last updated on: August 16, 2022

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It’s no secret that homework can be a real pain. For many students, it feels like a never-ending battle against frustration and fatigue.

Homework may sometimes feel like an endless mountain of worry. Homework frustration can lead to irritation and worry, preventing you from attaining your best outcomes.

Nevertheless, modifying your study habits may prevent this sense of helplessness. If completed in an organized and effective manner, homework and study may be a productive and enjoyable experience.

But while it may seem impossible to make homework any more manageable, there are ways to make the process less painful. This article will provide tips for dealing with difficult homework.

Why Do Students Struggle With Homework?

Students struggle with schoolwork for a variety of reasons. The assignment challenges may be overly tricky, dull, or unorganized. However, occasionally it appears that kids do not do their schoolwork.

Understanding why students delay or fail to complete their homework can help teachers create more effective assignments and comprehend why students may not be completing their homework.

Lack of Nutrition and Sleep

Students need to have a nutritious diet and get enough sleep. Unfortunately, many students don’t get either of these things. This can lead to difficulty concentrating and retaining information.

Lack of Focus

It can be hard to focus on homework when so many other things are happening. For example, if a student is dealing with a personal issue or is not interested in the subject, it won’t be easy to focus.

Trying to Multitask

Many students try to multitask while they’re doing their homework. This can make it take longer and make it more difficult. It’s essential to focus on one task at a time.

Mental Health Issues

Mental health issues can make it difficult to focus and concentrate. This can make homework seem impossible. If a student is struggling with their mental health, they should seek help from a professional.

No Passion About the Subject

If a student has no passion for the subject, it will be challenging to do well. Homework is often more complicated when it’s something that the student doesn’t care about.

Inability to Prioritize

Many students have trouble knowing what to do first. This can lead to procrastination and feeling overwhelmed. It’s essential to plan and prioritize the tasks that need to be done.

Poor Time Management Skills

Students who don’t know how to manage their time struggle with homework. This is because they either try to do too much at once or procrastinate. Either way, it will be challenging to get the work done.

Physical Pain

If a student is in pain, it will be challenging to focus on homework. This can be due to an injury or a chronic condition. If a student is in pain, they should seek help from a doctor or another professional.

Overwhelmed by the Workload

Doing it will be challenging if students feel they have too much homework. This is because they’ll feel overwhelmed and stressed. Students should talk to their teacher or another adult for help if they feel overwhelmed.

Too Many Stimuli

If there’s too much going on around a student, it will be challenging to focus. For example, it will be difficult to concentrate if there’s a lot of noise or if they’re trying to do homework while watching TV.

What Makes Homework Difficult?

Homework is a widespread educational activity. Even for students who find their homework relevant and fascinating, doing homework can be tricky since it frequently happens alongside more engaging and compelling after-school activities.

Complex Instructions

Sometimes, homework assignments come with complex instructions that are difficult to understand. This can frustrate students, making the assignment much harder to complete.

Time Constraints

Homework assignments often come with time constraints, making them difficult to complete. This is especially true if the student has other obligations, such as a job or extracurricular activities.

Lack of Interest

In some cases, students are not interested in the subject matter. This can make it difficult to focus on the homework and finish it on time.

What Are the Best Ways to Handle Difficult Homework?

There are several homework tips for students when handling difficult homework. Sometimes, it’s helpful to ask for help from a teacher or tutor. In other cases, it might be beneficial to take a break from the assignment and return to it later.

Several different study techniques can help students complete their homework more effectively.

Practise Good Time Management

This is especially important if you have a lot of other obligations. Set aside enough time to complete the homework, and try to work on it little by little instead of all at once.

Listen to Your Teacher and Take Notes

This is an excellent way to make sure you understand the material. Pay attention in class, and take notes that you can refer to when doing your homework.

Allow More Time for Areas You Find Difficult

If you’re struggling with a particular subject, allowing more time for that subject might be helpful. This will give you more time to complete the homework and understand the material.

Refresh Your Memory Regularly

It can be helpful to review the material regularly. This will help you understand it better and make it easier to complete the homework.

Get a Good Night’s Sleep

This is important for overall health and well-being but can also help with homework. A good night’s sleep will help you focus and be more productive.

Avoid Procrastination

Enjoying this article? Get our 137-page guide to doing well in high school here.

This can be not easy, but it’s important to avoid procrastinating . If you start your homework early, you’ll have more time to complete it and will be less likely to rush through it.

Have a Healthy Snack

A healthy snack can help you focus and concentrate. It’s important to avoid sugary snacks, as they can make you feel sluggish.

Remember to Breathe

It’s important to remember to breathe. If you’re feeling stressed out, take a few deep breaths and try to relax. This will help you focus and be more productive.

Take Breaks

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, take a break from the homework. This will help you clear your head and return to the assignment with fresh eyes.

How to Motivate Yourself to Do Your Homework?

Homework can be difficult, but it’s essential to try to stay motivated. There are many different things you can do to motivate yourself.

Turn Off Different Distractions

One of the best ways to stay motivated is to turn off different distractions. This means putting away your phone, turning off the TV, and finding a quiet place to work.

Choose a Convenient Place

One of the best ways to motivate yourself to do your homework is to choose a convenient place to work. This might be a quiet spot in your house or a local library.

Set a Goal for Your Motivation to Do Homework

It can be helpful to set a goal for your motivation to do homework. For example, you might want to finish your homework in a certain amount of time or get a grade on the assignment.

Think About the Advantages

It can be helpful to think about the advantages of doing your homework. For example, you might be able to get a better grade or improve your understanding of the material.

Try Different Techniques and Methodologies

If you’re having trouble staying motivated, try different techniques and methodologies. This might mean listening to music while you work or taking breaks every 20 minutes.

Find Something Interesting

If you’re struggling to find motivation, try to find something in the homework that is interesting to you. This will help you focus and make the assignment more enjoyable.

Be With Someone

This might not be suitable for everyone, but you can try betting with someone that you’ll complete the homework. This can help you stay motivated and focused on the task.

Create a Schedule

Another way to motivate yourself is to create a schedule . This will help you stay organized and ensure you’re allotting enough time to complete the homework.

Do Lesson With Classmates

This can be a great way to motivate yourself. Working with classmates can make the homework more enjoyable and help you stay on track.

Make the Computer Your Assistant

If you’re having trouble focusing, try using the computer to help you with your homework. Several different apps and programs can help you stay organized and motivated.

Ask Parents for Help

This is a good option if you’re struggling to motivate yourself. Parents can help you stay on track and offer guidance and support.

Use a Reward System

One way to stay motivated is to use a reward system. For example, you might allow yourself to take a break after finishing a certain amount of homework. This will help you stay focused and motivated.

Wrapping Things Up: 9 Tips for Dealing With Difficult Homework

The nine tips we’ve provided should help you deal with difficult homework. If you’re struggling to stay motivated, try some of the suggested strategies. Remember to take breaks and breathe deeply if you feel overwhelmed. Most importantly, don’t give up – keep trying until you find different homework strategies that work for you. Your success is just around the corner.

Professor Conquer

Professor Conquer started Conquer Your Exam in 2018 to help students feel more confident and better prepared for their tough tests. Prof excelled in high school, graduating top of his class and receiving admissions into several Ivy League and top 15 schools. He has helped many students through the years tutoring and mentoring K-12, consulting seniors through the college admissions process, and writing extensive how-to guides for school.

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Is College Too Hard?

by Vige Barrie

December 22, 2022

College News

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In an essay titled “ Is College Too Hard? ” appearing in  Inside Higher Ed , President David Wippman  began by reviewing student stress versus workload. With co-author Cornell Professor Glenn Altschuler, he observed, “…assumptions about the relationship between workload and stress predate the pandemic by decades.”

Noting the decline in the amount of homework assigned versus the increasing level of student stress, the authors wrote, “As educators, we should be asking how much homework is too much, and whether some kinds of homework are better than others. Is homework demonstrably related to articulated learning goals? … Ultimately, we want students to set their own priorities, manage their time and engage in conversations with educational professionals about how to strike the right balance between academic work and personal well-being.”

“Is College Too Hard?” appeared in the Dec. 14 issue of  Inside Higher Ed . 

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Homework Struggles May Not Be a Behavior Problem

Exploring some options to understand and help..

Posted August 2, 2022 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

• Mental health challenges and neurodevelopmental differences directly affect children's ability to do homework.
• Understanding what difficulties are getting in the way—beyond the usual explanation of a behavior problem—is key.
• Sleep and mental health needs can take priority over homework completion.

Chelsea was in 10th grade the first time I told her directly to stop doing her homework and get some sleep. I had been working with her since she was in middle school, treating her anxiety disorder. She deeply feared disappointing anyone—especially her teachers—and spent hours trying to finish homework perfectly. The more tired and anxious she got, the harder it got for her to finish the assignments.

One night Chelsea called me in despair, feeling hopeless. She was exhausted and couldn’t think straight. She felt like a failure and that she was a burden to everyone because she couldn’t finish her homework.

She was shocked when I told her that my prescription for her was to go to sleep now—not to figure out how to finish her work. I told her to leave her homework incomplete and go to sleep. We briefly discussed how we would figure it out the next day, with her mom and her teachers. At that moment, it clicked for her that it was futile to keep working—because nothing was getting done.

This was an inflection point for her awareness of when she was emotionally over-cooked and when she needed to stop and take a break or get some sleep. We repeated versions of this phone call several times over the course of her high school and college years, but she got much better at being able to do this for herself most of the time.

When Mental Health Symptoms Interfere with Homework

Kids with mental health or neurodevelopmental challenges often struggle mightily with homework. Challenges can come up in every step of the homework process, including, but not limited to:

• Remembering and tracking assignments and materials
• Getting the mental energy/organization to start homework
• Filtering distractions enough to persist with assignments
• Understanding unspoken or implied parts of the homework
• Remembering to bring finished homework to class
• Being in class long enough to know the material
• Tolerating the fear of not knowing or failing
• Not giving up the assignment because of a panic attack
• Tolerating frustration—such as not understanding—without emotional dysregulation
• Being able to ask for help—from a peer or a teacher and not being afraid to reach out

This list is hardly comprehensive. ADHD , autism spectrum disorder, social anxiety , generalized anxiety, panic disorder, depression , dysregulation, and a range of other neurodevelopmental and mental health challenges cause numerous learning differences and symptoms that can specifically and frequently interfere with getting homework done.

The Usual Diagnosis for Homework Problems is "Not Trying Hard Enough"

Unfortunately, when kids frequently struggle to meet homework demands, teachers and parents typically default to one explanation of the problem: The child is making a choice not to do their homework. That is the default “diagnosis” in classrooms and living rooms. And once this framework is drawn, the student is often seen as not trying hard enough, disrespectful, manipulative, or just plain lazy.

The fundamental disconnect here is that the diagnosis of homework struggles as a behavioral choice is, in fact, only one explanation, while there are so many other diagnoses and differences that impair children's ability to consistently do their homework. If we are trying to create solutions based on only one understanding of the problem, the solutions will not work. More devastatingly, the wrong solutions can worsen the child’s mental health and their long-term engagement with school and learning.

To be clear, we aren’t talking about children who sometimes struggle with or skip homework—kids who can change and adapt their behaviors and patterns in response to the outcomes of that struggle. For this discussion, we are talking about children with mental health and/or neurodevelopmental symptoms and challenges that create chronic difficulties with meeting homework demands.

How Can You Help a Child Who Struggles with Homework?

How can you help your child who is struggling to meet homework demands because of their ADHD, depression, anxiety, OCD , school avoidance, or any other neurodevelopmental or mental health differences? Let’s break this down into two broad areas—things you can do at home, and things you can do in communication with the school.

Helping at Home

The following suggestions for managing school demands at home can feel counterintuitive to parents—because we usually focus on helping our kids to complete their tasks. But mental health needs jump the line ahead of task completion. And starting at home will be key to developing an idea of what needs to change at school.

• Set an end time in the evening after which no more homework will be attempted. Kids need time to decompress and they need sleep—and pushing homework too close to or past bedtime doesn’t serve their educational needs. Even if your child hasn’t been able to approach the homework at all, even if they have avoided and argued the whole evening, it is still important for everyone to have a predictable time to shut down the whole process.
• If there are arguments almost every night about homework, if your child isn’t starting homework or finishing it, reframe it from failure into information. It’s data to put into problem-solving. We need to consider other possible explanations besides “behavioral choice” when trying to understand the problem and create effective solutions. What problems are getting in the way of our child’s meeting homework demands that their peers are meeting most of the time?
• Try not to argue about homework. If you can check your own anxiety and frustration, it can be more productive to ally with your child and be curious with them. Kids usually can’t tell you a clear “why” but maybe they can tell you how they are feeling and what they are thinking. And if your child can’t talk about it or just keeps saying “I don't know,” try not to push. Come back another time. Rushing, forcing, yelling, and threatening will predictably not help kids do homework.

Helping at School

The second area to explore when your neurodiverse child struggles frequently with homework is building communication and connections with school and teachers. Some places to focus on include the following.

• Label your child’s diagnoses and break down specific symptoms for the teachers and school team. Nonjudgmental, but specific language is essential for teachers to understand your child’s struggles. Breaking their challenges down into the problems specific to homework can help with building solutions. As your child gets older, help them identify their difficulties and communicate them to teachers.
• Let teachers and the school team know that your child’s mental health needs—including sleep—take priority over finishing homework. If your child is always struggling to complete homework and get enough sleep, or if completing homework is leading to emotional meltdowns every night, adjusting their homework demands will be more successful than continuing to push them into sleep deprivation or meltdowns.
• Request a child study team evaluation to determine if your child qualifies for services under special education law such as an IEP, or accommodations through section 504—and be sure that homework adjustments are included in any plan. Or if such a plan is already in place, be clear that modification of homework expectations needs to be part of it.

The Long-Term Story

I still work with Chelsea and she recently mentioned how those conversations so many years ago are still part of how she approaches work tasks or other demands that are spiking her anxiety when she finds herself in a vortex of distress. She stops what she is doing and prioritizes reducing her anxiety—whether it’s a break during her day or an ending to the task for the evening. She sees that this is crucial to managing her anxiety in her life and still succeeding at what she is doing.

Task completion at all costs is not a solution for kids with emotional needs. Her story (and the story of many of my patients) make this crystal clear.

Candida Fink, M.D. , is board certified in child/adolescent and general psychiatry. She practices in New York and has co-authored two books— The Ups and Downs of Raising a Bipolar Child and Bipolar Disorder for Dummies.

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Officials say FAFSA fixes are coming. For many students, it's too late.

Bricelyn Harrelson didn’t plan to spend six months applying to college.

The New Smyrna Beach, Florida, high school senior sent in seven applications starting last September and expected to know by now where she’d be enrolling this fall. Instead, she blasted out six fresh applications in the last two months — all to cheaper state universities.

Harrelson, 18, is one of millions of current and prospective college students whose application process has been derailed by the Free Application for Federal Student Aid’s botched overhaul this year. A series of glitches and formula errors — from its December launch to as recently as a week ago — has turned what was supposed to be a more streamlined process into a bureaucratic purgatory for applicants and admissions officers alike.

“I feel bad for the kids,” said Kerri Harrelson, Bricelyn’s mother. She said her daughter has heard back from all but two of her six latest schools, but that one of the ongoing FAFSA snags has held up potential need-based aid offers. “They started in high school with Covid, and now they’re going to start their college year with all this mess.”

FAFSA is a chokepoint for other forms of aid. Without knowing how much a student may get from the federal government, many schools and scholarship programs can’t put together offers of their own. Federal authorities say they’ll take a key step toward moving the process forward in mid-April.

While many students, like Harrelson, remain in holding patterns, others say they’ve already been forced into difficult decisions they hadn’t expected to make.

Moving money to pay tuition

Eyeing the FAFSA mess, Kelly Gainor decided to slash her 401(k) contributions almost in half this year to save money for tuition.

Her daughter, Kennedy, is still waiting for her federal aid information, but she’s already committed to her dream school, James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, to nail down campus housing. Without FAFSA, any potential merit scholarships are up in the air, leaving their household unsure how many loans they’ll need to take out.

“This stress level is at a whole new level for me,” said Gainor, who works as a contract manager for a health insurance company in Albany, New York.

She and her husband have a $25,000 college fund for Kennedy, their only child. But they’re worried it won’t go as far as they’d hoped and have begun moving some investments into more aggressive options. They’ve also shelved plans to buy a new car this year.

“It just feels very challenging to be put in a spot where you’re potentially taking on $100,000 worth of debt, but not even knowing exactly what you’re getting into,” Gainor said.

Of the more than 6.9 million FAFSA applications submitted this year, nearly all had been processed as of April 5 and normal processing times of 1 to 3 days have resumed, a spokesperson said. However, the agency has since identified additional errors requiring nearly 20% to be reprocessed.

I feel like we’re agreeing to buy a car or a house without knowing how much it costs.

Natalie Alvarado, Shawnee, Ks

The department, which has been providing regular updates and informational webinars as it worked through its backlog, acknowledged applicants’ challenges this year and said it has been “all hands on deck” to address them.

In a recent American Council on Education survey , 2 out of 3 college officials said they doubted they could process students’ financial information from FAFSA “within a few weeks.” Given the delays, many universities have pushed back accepted students’ decision deadlines from around May 1 to anywhere from May 15 to June 15.

Some college athletes’ families have also begun planning for financial fallout rather than wait around for aid information.

“I feel like we’re agreeing to buy a car or a house without knowing how much it costs,” said Natalie Alvarado, whose son, Roman, committed in March to attending MidAmerica Nazarene University in the family’s home state of Kansas, to secure his spot on the soccer team.

The family doesn’t know how much money may come through beyond the athletic scholarship the university is offering to cover half of Roman’s tuition.

“We have our own debt, and we know what that’s like,” Alvarado said, “but I know that he needs to attend school to get a good job. I know his dream of playing soccer, and I just want him to be able to fulfill that dream.”

Settling for safety schools

Olivia Maynard Payne, an Advanced Placement student from Lutz, Florida, who wants to study biology, committed to her last-choice school, the University of Southern Florida, because it was the safest financial choice.

Her mother, Ann Maynard Payne, is a single parent who relies on permanent disability payments to support Olivia and a grandson. To help save for college, Olivia has been working several part-time jobs up to 30 hours a week while attending high school. But the household was banking on FAFSA to help cover her college costs, and one of the widespread application issues has prevented them from signing the online form.

“This new algorithm has disrupted and caused so much anxiety for me, and especially Olivia,” Maynard Payne said. “She’s not happy. This is not her school.” But holding out for aid information while campus housing slots filled up wasn’t an option, she said.

Olivia got into Mercer University in Macon, Georgia; the University of Rochester in New York; and Massachusetts’ Wellesley College, each of which offered her merit scholarships that ranged from $9,000 to $29,000 a year. But all three are still out of budget, and until her FAFSA forms are processed, she can’t determine whether those schools or the government will offer her additional need-based support that could put them within reach.

So after qualifying for Florida’s Bright Futures program, allowing her to attend USF for free, Olivia ruled out switching her choice even if more money comes through.

“That would just stress me out more,” she said. “If I did hold out hope for that, and then they ended up not giving me nearly enough, it’d just be more disappointment.”

Shelving four-year plans for community college

​​Sherri Schendzielos, a mother of a blended family in Blaine, Minnesota, has four out of six children currently in or applying to college.

It’s like I just submitted information out into a black hole.

Sherri Schendzielos, Blaine, MN

Her eldest biological son, Jonah, 21, is a sophomore at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, and her stepson Avery, 20, has one summer semester left at Hennepin Technical College in suburban Minneapolis. Blake, 18, her younger biological son, and Sam, 17, her younger stepson, are high school seniors both applying to college this fall.

Schendzielos, her husband, Eric, and his ex-wife each completed FAFSA forms for the four kids, all of which are listed as processed. But they have yet to receive a single financial aid package.

“It’s like I just submitted information out into a black hole,” Schendzielos said. “At this point, I don’t even know if we’re ever going to hear anything.”

Blake is already committed to play Division III football at Bethel University in Saint Paul. But Sam has opted to start at a local community college rather than join his brother at Bethel, where he was also admitted, due to uncertain finances.

“While he’s choosing still to go to school, it’s not his choice necessarily,” said Schendzielos.

She is an assistant high school principal and her husband works in IT. Together they bring in about $200,000 a year, and with a fifth child in their family who’s 10 years old, she said student loans and grants are essential to funding higher education in their household.

“I just am hoping something works out,” Schendzielos said. “I just feel like a failure not being able to have a solution to this.”

Haley Messenger is a producer at NBC News covering business and the economy.

Sara Ruberg is an associate producer with NBC News.

How UConn built the ‘most complex’ — and efficient —offense in college basketball

GLENDALE, Ariz. — In the summer of 2022, Connecticut coach Dan Hurley decided he was going to adopt a new offensive system and a new way of teaching set plays. Hurley opted to go with a football approach. He came up with a glossary of terms for different alignments and actions.

He gives a made-up example: “14 jet zoom pitch twin.”

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The 14 is for the alignment — a one-four low — and then the Huskies stack actions on top of each other. In this case, a jet, then a zoom, then a pitch, then a twin.

“It’s like learning a language,” Hurley says.

The new offense, heavy on off-ball screening and movement, won the Huskies a national title in 2023. Then last summer, Hurley essentially ripped up the UConn dictionary and came up with a new glossary of terms.

“We do that because of paranoia,” says assistant coach Luke Murray, who acts as the program’s offensive coordinator.

It’s probably not necessary, because UConn ’s choreographed sets leave opponents’ heads spinning already. Defending UConn is like trying to multitask inside a classroom full of screaming children. An example from Saturday’s semifinal against Alabama :

The play starts when UConn’s best shooter, Cam Spencer , catches the ball and passes to the wing, then gets a chin screen set for him by Donovan Clingan and heads toward the basket. He then loops around and sets a back screen for Alex Karaban . This is where the confusion for Alabama’s defense begins. Alabama’s Aaron Estrada and Rylan Griffen almost switch.

Grant Nelson , defending Clingan, is standing in the middle of the lane, sagging off Clingan and attempting to play the role of air traffic controller. His head is turning right and left, keeping an eye on what’s happening behind him. With the two Alabama guards confused on the switch, Spencer turns to his right and sets the first of two stagger screens meant for Tristen Newton . Newton rejects the screen and cuts to the basket. This actually gives Griffen the chance to get back in position, but then comes another screen from Clingan. And Griffen is toast. Spencer curls and gets a free-throw line jumper. Ideally, Nelson would provide help, but he was stuck in his control center in the paint and scared to fully abandon Clingan rolling to the rim.

It takes three or four viewings to figure out exactly what’s happening. Now imagine trying to defend all of that in real-time.

“I’ve been studying the top offenses in the country in-depth for the past five years, and UConn’s combination of off-ball screening and ball movement within their sets and the number of sets that they run makes it the most complex offense that I’ve seen in that time,” says Jordan Sperber, a former video coordinator at New Mexico State who has become the X’s-and-O’s czar of college basketball, documenting it all in his weekly Hoops Vision newsletter. Sperber made a UConn offense video last month titled “Why This Offense is Basketball Poetry.”

“Their halfcourt offense is picturesque,” Xavier coach Sean Miller says.

Last week, Philadelphia 76ers wing Nicolas Batum tweeted that he’s unfamiliar with watching college basketball, but “the way UConn is playing is the way basketball should be taught and played. Especially at that age.”

Bob Hurley Sr., the father of Dan and a coaching legend himself, says all of his coaching buddies back east rave to him how fun this team is to watch.

Dan Hurley has long had a reputation for coaching tough teams who play hard. But an offensive savant? Typically his defenses were always better than his offenses. Not until his 11th season as a college head coach did Hurley have a top-50 offense. And last season, when the Huskies finished third, was Hurley’s first time with a top-20 offense. This year’s Huskies enter Monday night’s national championship game against Purdue as the most efficient offense in college basketball. It feels like he’s on the verge of a dynasty.

How did this happen?

When Hurley took over Connecticut in 2018, the Huskies were in the American Athletic Conference. The best teams in the league were Houston and Wichita State . Those teams had big, physical frontlines, so Hurley tried to match them. At Rhode Island, Hurley had played a lot of four-and-around-one with a heavy dose of ball-screen offense. He carried the ball-screen concepts over to UConn, but now he had two posts on the floor. Spacing was a problem.

Hurley wanted to go to a more modern approach with four perimeter players, and he brought on Murray to help him with the offense. Murray had been with Hurley in his first season as a college head coach at Wagner in 2010-11. Hurley tried to make up for a talent gap that season by milking the shot clock. If you study all of his teams, it’s that first Wagner team that’s probably most identifiable to his last two UConn squads. The strength of that roster was its shooting, and Hurley ran a lot of floppy action to free shooters. Wagner finished 18th that season in assist rate. Hurley wouldn’t have another team finish in the top 100 in assist rate until last year’s team finished eighth. (This year’s team is fifth.)

Murray rejoined Hurley in April 2021, but they couldn’t institute the plan right away because Hurley felt loyalty to senior forward Isaiah Whaley . Also, point guard RJ Cole was best operating out of ball screens, so UConn played a traditional two-big lineup and leaned on the pick-and-roll.

But in the summer of 2022, the plan was put in place. The Huskies had an elite shooter in Jordan Hawkins , who was perfect as a marksman they could run off screens and use his gravity to open others. Then they also had the ideal stretch four in Karaban, a freshman who graduated early and showed up at semester break during the 2021-22 season.

“It was really clear that we were going to move to a much more of an off-ball screening identity,” Murray says.

Hurley and Murray studied European teams, stealing different concepts and packages that they could use.

“It’s not like a replica necessarily,” Murray says. “It’s just piecing together what makes the most sense for the group that we have.”

The goal is to put stress on the defense, stacking multiple actions that create indecision for the defense. Most set plays are choreographed. While the Huskies sometimes looked patterned, their offense is like a choose-your-own-adventure story.

“If you make a decision to reject the screen, now that sets off a chain of events with two or three other off-ball scenarios,” Murray explains. “That’s something that we really work on hard, because good defensive teams a lot of times can do a good job at taking teams out of set plays. But I think the randomness of the way that we cut, the randomness of the way that we screen and the versatility of our guys as passers and movers and screeners and shooters really makes it hard.”

Murray says that the Huskies take a lot of pride in their defense, which ranks fourth nationally, but he estimates practices are a 65-35 split between offense and defense.

“You can have the greatest concepts in the world, but guys have to be able to execute them with intelligence, and with a knack for timing and spacing and really having a great understanding of how they’re being defended,” Murray says. “That’s one of the things that we try to emphasize a lot in game prep. Most scouting is based on what the other team is running. For us, we talk a lot about the way that the other team is guarding us.”

Because the Huskies set so many off-ball screens, a lot of teams switch frequently. Early in the season that switching gave UConn some issues. While injuries played a part in UConn’s loss at Kansas, KU’s switching defense also stymied the Huskies in their first loss of the season.

They spent a lot of practice time early repping what to do against these switches. When Clingan was hurt, they started building more cutting into their sets, especially when they would go to five-out offense with Karaban at center.

“They got really good against anybody that switches with their slipping and their false actions,” Creighton coach Greg McDermott says. “If you shoot under a screen, or make a mistake on a late switch, they’ll break out of it and try to make you pay.”

It’s especially difficult to stop when Clingan has the ball up top or in the corner, pulling the rim-protector away. Clingan is good at reading the defense and he easily sees over the defense because of his height. This is when back cuts are deadly.

The endless cutting puts the defense in a panic.

“If you cut and you don’t get the ball, you open it up for someone else,” Karaban says.

The Huskies also can punish switches with the drive. If a big man switches onto Newton, which happens in the play below, he knows it’s time to attack.

Clingan is also capable of executing dribble handoffs, and his sheer size makes those actions almost impossible to defend because it’s hard to get around him. And if Clingan’s man decides to switch, the Huskies will send him to the post and try to feed him the ball there.

A lot of last year’s offense was built around Hawkins running around endless screens and then a late duck-in for Adama Sanogo . The plan this year was to mostly replicate what worked last year except for more pick-and-roll for Clingan and backup center Samson Johnson . Finding a replacement for Hawkins became a necessity. The Huskies landed Spencer, who shot 43.4 percent on 3s last season at Rutgers , but the Huskies figured out he was capable of being more than just a knockdown shooter.

Defending last year’s team was like trying to figure out geometry. This season it’s like trying to solve trigonometry. Spencer can handle the ball in the pick-and-roll and then is awesome moving without the ball. He has the highest offensive rating in college basketball. Karaban can also fly off screens and is a terrific cutter. And they’re not always coming from the same spots.

“They can run the same action and flip-flop players, which I don’t think is as common as everybody would think,” Miller says.

“What this coaching staff does better than anybody is just put you in position to be successful,” Spencer says. “They’re gonna help you play to your strengths and help you grow your weaknesses. There are times to go off script, and Coach Hurley will let you know when those times are, but you don’t have to with this team, honestly. We’re so unselfish, and the ball will find you. And if it doesn’t, then too bad; it’s not your night.”

That line of thinking is why UConn’s shot selection is so good. It’s also why the Huskies rank 328th in adjusted tempo, because many halfcourt possessions can go deep into the shot clock.

“When they’re in the halfcourt, they’re very patient and they execute,” Miller says. “But when you talk about what makes them great, I think it’s the combination of how elite they are in transition and running their sets. I don’t think there’s anybody in college basketball that’s more dangerous in the open court.”

This is the other area where Hurley wanted to become elite. He likes to strike fast off missed shots, not wanting his players to look for a play call from the sideline, but rather move it up the floor quickly and hunt transition 3s. The Huskies are the seventh-most efficient transition team in college basketball and rank fifth in halfcourt efficiency, per Synergy. They are the only team in the country to rank in the top 10 in both.

Those numbers are only reflective of first-chance opportunities and do not value second-chance and third-chance opportunities, and UConn ranks 13th in offensive rebounding rate.

“Your work starts when they shoot the shot,” McDermott says, “because they’re coming on the offensive glass.”

It’s exhausting to face, because there’s never a moment to relax against the Huskies. It’s why they’ve now won 11 straight games by double-digits in the NCAA Tournament. Alabama hung around for 35 minutes on Saturday, but then Spencer hit that free-throw line jumper, then came another intricate, 20-second set that set up a Karaban 3-pointer, then came a pick-and-roll dunk for Clingan, then Spencer curled around a Clingan screen, engaged his defender and passed him the ball for a dunk — another beautiful play design that eliminated the help.

The ( Crimson ) Tide broke, as the Huskies scored on seven of their final nine possessions.

Every game seems inevitable, and Miller says the scary part out loud for the rest of college basketball.

“(Hurley) has grown and evolved,” Miller says. “He’s become more sophisticated, and certainly more sure of himself.”

And that evolved offensive approach has him on the brink of back-to-back titles. And who knows how many more.

(Top photo of Cam Spencer: Elsa / Getty Images)

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C.J. Moore, a staff writer for The Athletic, has been on the college basketball beat since 2011. He has worked at Bleacher Report as the site’s national college basketball writer and also covered the sport for CBSSports.com and Basketball Prospectus. He is the coauthor of "Beyond the Streak," a behind-the-scenes look at Kansas basketball's record-setting Big 12 title run. Follow CJ on Twitter @ cjmoorehoops

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Guest Essay

Is This the End of Academic Freedom?

By Paula Chakravartty and Vasuki Nesiah

Dr. Chakravartty is a professor of media, communication and culture at New York University, where Dr. Nesiah is a professor of practice in human rights and international law.

​At New York University, the spring semester began with a poetry reading. Students and faculty gathered in the atrium of Bobst Library. At that time, about 26,000 Palestinians had already been killed in Israel’s horrific war on Gaza; the reading was a collective act of bearing witness.

The last poem read aloud was titled “If I Must Die.” It was written, hauntingly, by a Palestinian poet and academic named Refaat Alareer who was killed weeks earlier by an Israeli airstrike. The poem ends: “If I must die, let it bring hope — let it be a tale.”

Soon after those lines were recited, the university administration shut the reading down . Afterward, we learned that students and faculty members were called into disciplinary meetings for participating in this apparently “disruptive” act; written warnings were issued.

We have both taught at N.Y.U. for over a decade and believe we are in a moment of unparalleled repression. Over the past six months, since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, we have seen the university administration fail to adequately protect dissent on campus, actively squelching it instead. We believe what we are witnessing in response to student, staff and faculty opposition to the war violates the very foundations of academic freedom.

While N.Y.U. says that it remains committed to free expression on campus and that its rules about and approach to protest activity haven’t changed, students and faculty members in solidarity with the Palestinian people have found the campus environment alarmingly constrained.

About a week after Hamas’s attacks in October, the Grand Staircase in the Kimmel student center, a storied site of student protests , closed indefinitely; it has yet to reopen fully. A graduate student employee was reprimanded for putting up fliers in support of Palestinians on the student’s office door and ultimately took them down; that person is not the only N.Y.U. student to face some form of disciplinary consequence for pro-Palestinian speech or action. A resolution calling for the university to reaffirm protection of pro-Palestinian speech and civic activity on campus, passed by the elected Student Government Assembly in December, has apparently been stuck in a procedural black hole since.

The New York Police Department has become a pervasive presence on campus, with over 6,000 hours of officer presence added after the war broke out. Hundreds of faculty members have signed onto an open letter condemning the university’s “culture of fear about campus speech and activism.”

Such draconian interventions are direct threats to academic freedom.

At universities across the country, any criticism of Israel’s policies, expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, organized calls for a cease-fire or even pedagogy on the recent history of the land have all emerged as perilous speech. In a letter to university presidents in November, the A.C.L.U. expressed concern about “impermissible chilling of free speech and association on campus” in relation to pro-Palestinian student groups and views; since then, the atmosphere at colleges has become downright McCarthyite .

The donors, trustees, administrators and third parties who oppose pro-Palestinian speech seem to equate any criticism of the State of Israel — an occupying power under international law and one accused of committing war crimes — with antisemitism. To them, the norms of free speech are inherently problematic, and a broad definition of antisemitism is a tool for censorship . Outside funding has poured into horrifying doxxing and harassment campaigns. Pro-Israel surveillance groups like Canary Mission and CAMERA relentlessly target individuals and groups deemed antisemitic or critical of Israel. Ominous threats follow faculty and students for just expressing their opinions or living out their values.

To be clear, we abhor all expressions of antisemitism and wholeheartedly reject any role for antisemitism on our campuses. Equally, we believe that conflating criticism of Israel or Zionism with antisemitism is dangerous. Equating the criticism of any nation with inherent racism endangers basic democratic freedoms on and off campus. As the A.C.L.U. wrote in its November statement, a university “cannot fulfill its mission as a forum for vigorous debate” if it polices the views of faculty members and students, however much any of us may disagree with them or find them offensive.

In a wave of crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech nationwide, students have had scholarships revoked, job offers pulled and student groups suspended. At Columbia, protesters have reported being sprayed by what they said was skunk, a chemical weapon used by the Israeli military; at Northwestern, two Black students faced criminal charges , later dropped, for publishing a pro-Palestinian newspaper parody; at Cornell, students were arrested during a peaceful protest . In a shocking episode of violence last fall, three Palestinian students , two of them wearing kaffiyehs, were shot while walking near the University of Vermont.

Many more cases of student repression on campuses are unfolding.

Academic freedom, as defined by the American Association of University Professors in the mid-20th century , provides protection for the pursuit of knowledge by faculty members, whose job is to educate, learn and research both inside and outside the academy. Not only does this resonate with the Constitution’s free speech protections ; international human rights law also affirms the centrality of academic freedom to the right to education and the institutional autonomy of educational institutions.

Across the United States, attacks on free speech are on the rise . In recent years, right-wing groups opposed to the teaching of critical race theory have tried to undermine these principles through measures including restrictions on the discussion of history and structural racism in curriculums, heightened scrutiny of lectures and courses that are seen to promote dissent and disciplinary procedures against academics who work on these topics.

What people may not realize is that speech critical of Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies has long been censored, posing persistent challenges to those of us who uphold academic freedom. Well before Oct. 7, speech and action at N.Y.U. in support of Palestinians faced intense and undue scrutiny.

Our students are heeding Refaat Alareer’s call to bear witness. They are speaking out — writing statements, organizing protests and responding to a plausible threat of genocide with idealism and conviction. As faculty members, we believe that college should be a time when students are encouraged to ask big questions about justice and the future of humanity and to pursue answers however disquieting to the powerful.

Universities must be places where students have access to specialized knowledge that shapes contemporary debates, where faculty members are encouraged to be public intellectuals, even when, or perhaps especially when, they are expressing dissenting opinions speaking truth to power. Classrooms must allow for contextual learning, where rapidly mutating current events are put into a longer historical timeline.

This is a high-stakes moment. A century ago, attacks on open discussion of European antisemitism, the criminalization of dissent and the denial of Jewish histories of oppression and dispossession helped create the conditions for the Holocaust. One crucial “never again” lesson from that period is that the thought police can be dangerous. They can render vulnerable communities targets of oppression. They can convince the world that some lives are not as valuable as others, justifying mass slaughter.

It is no wonder that students across the country are protesting an unpopular and brutal war that, besides Israel, only the United States is capable of stopping. It is extraordinary that the very institutions that ought to safeguard their exercise of free speech are instead escalating surveillance and policing, working on ever more restrictive student conduct rules and essentially risking the death of academic freedom.

From the Vietnam War to apartheid South Africa, universities have been important places for open discussion and disagreement about government policies, the historical record, structural racism and settler colonialism. They have also long served as sites of protest. If the university cannot serve as an arena for such freedoms, the possibilities of democratic life inside and outside the university gates are not only impoverished but under threat of extinction.

Paula Chakravartty is a professor of media, communication and culture at New York University, where Vasuki Nesiah is a professor of practice in human rights and international law. Both are members of the executive committee of the N.Y.U. chapter of the American Association of University Professors and members of N.Y.U.’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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What Michigan State football coaches saw in scrimmage, and what it all means

EAST LANSING — With new defensive coordinator Joe Rossi teaching Michigan State football ’s new schemes and responsibilities, Jalen Thompson believes the complete install of the new system is only about an eighth of the way complete.

The rest will roll out over the final five workouts, culminating in the Spartan “Spring Showcase” on April 20, and throughout preseason camp in August. But new coach Jonathan Smith’s team took its first major step toward that with Saturday’s first scrimmage of his tenure.

“I feel like everybody's playing fast, everybody's playing hard,” Thompson, the sophomore defensive end, said Tuesday after the 10th of MSU’s 15 spring practices. “The defense was getting at it. Yea, we had a good day.”

No details of the first scrimmage were released other than a few selected video highlights the program released on social media. However, new defensive line coach Legi Suiaunoa said the Spartans got in “80-plus plays,” the most work they’ve had to this point in the spring.

FORGETTING THE PAST: Can MSU secondary's 'clean slate' erase last four terrible seasons?

“I really, really, really liked that we got to scrimmage,” Suiaunoa said with a chuckle. “Obviously, we had some bodies that we were down in the early part of the scrimmage, banged up a little bit. Just getting out there and just playing football and seeing what these guys can do when it's live, when there's not a coach, there’s not a script, that these guys are just playing — I liked that that part a lot.

“Our job is to hopefully (see if) their natural reactions, the way they play, is the way we want them to play. So the scrimmage helps identify some of those things that we need to continue to work on or we need to address.”

MSU likely will have at least one more closed scrimmage over the final two weeks. The “Showcase” event at Spartan Stadium, according to a team news release , will be the final practice of the spring. That makes every scrimmage opportunity important for guys trying to impress their new coaches.

“I think it puts a little bit more quote unquote, pressure on the players,” Rossi said. “You have practice and it's play to play — it's first down, it's second down, it's all scripted, right? You get into a scrimmage, it's more of a true game-like feel, where you're putting the ball down and you're playing. It's not quite a game, but sometimes you take for granted as a player, you get in that situation, and now maybe you forget or overlook some of the fundamentals that maybe were there when it was in a more controlled environment. So the more we can kind of put them in those types of situations, the better.”

Rossi drew a few initial impressions of what he saw Saturday from his defense, saying he felt players ran to the ball and were physical. But he also reminded them it was just a start of a long journey to the Aug. 31 season opener against Florida Atlantic .

“I saw some good individual plays, but also saw plays that need to be improved and need to be corrected,” Rossi said. “For us, kind of our process is, 'Hey, let's look at that scrimmage and what can I learn from it? If I made a mistake, where can I improve? How can I get better?' Take all that information that you can get from that particular scrimmage, and then go apply it today at practice. That's what we talked about before we went out. What are the things you need to improve on based on what you saw on film?”

Thompson said he feels the defense — and team as a whole — have “lots of little details” that need to be addressed before the next time his coaches hold a true scrimmage.

“But we're all working towards it,” Thompson said. “That was our first time as a team playing that defense. So there was definitely a lot of little things we have to fix. But everybody's playing with a high level of effort, so it fixed some of the things, too.”

Minimizing risk

One of the other reasons why scrimmages are vital is because college football has moved away from tackling all the time during practice.

Thompson said everything was live Saturday, other than not being able to tackles quarterbacks. Most programs have shied away from tackling during practices as much as possible to avoid injuries — either guys being dragged to the ground hard, players getting rolled into as collateral action or other problems. That often is replaced with a technique called “thud,” or making contact with the opponent and releasing after the initial hit.

Which makes scrimmaging with tackling in as close to a game-like setting as teams get even more important. Especially in the spring. And especially when there has been a coaching change and there are a volume of changes being made.

“I think you can get tons done in 'thud,' because everything up front is live. There's a good physical finish to the tackle, you just don't go to the ground,” said Rossi, who Smith hired away from Big Ten foe Minnesota. “It's being able to walk that fine line between being physical but also being able to keep people healthy. The reality is the more you're on the ground, the more people get hurt. It's not just the guy getting the tackle, it's the lineman who's standing there in the pile that ends up getting tackled into.

“So (Smith) does a really good job of walking that line of here's the physical, live periods where we're tackling the ground, and then also here's the 'thud' periods where we can get good work and hopefully keep each other up.”

‘Showcase’ details

It will be a busy Saturday on MSU’s campus April 20.

The Izzo Legacy 5k Run/Walk/Roll will begin at 8:45 a.m., with the starting line at Breslin Center and the finish line at Spartan Stadium. Proceeds go to a number of MSU and mid-Michigan organizations and charities. To register and for additional details, visit https://www.izzolegacy.com .

That will be followed at 11 a.m. by MSU’s women’s tennis team facing Nebraska at the MSU Outdoor Tennis Center. Admission is free.

The "Spring Showcase" begins at 2 p.m., with a tape-delayed broadcast airing on BTN-Plus at 4 p.m. Admission and parking are free.

Gates to Spartan Stadium gates open at 12:15 p.m., with Smith and players taking pictures and signing autographs for fans on posters that also will be distributed free to those in attendance (no other items are permitted).

Free parking areas are designated in Lots 79, 63 and 126, along with Ramp 7. Lot 62 is reserved for accessible parking.

The Spartans’ softball team hosts Illinois at 1 p.m., and the baseball team hosts Penn State at 3:35 p.m. Tickets are $3-5 for each.

Contact Chris Solari: [email protected] . Follow him  @chrissolari .

  Subscribe to the "Spartan Speak" podcast for new episodes weekly on  Apple Podcasts ,  Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts. And catch all of our podcasts and daily voice briefing at  freep.com/podcasts .

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Texas Longhorns' Steve Sarkisian Has 'An Idea' How to Approach Upcoming Transfer Portal Window

Texas Longhorns coach Steve Sarkisian is making sure he and the staff do their homework ahead of next week's new transfer portal window.

• Author: Zach Dimmitt

In this story:

AUSTIN -- The Texas Longhorns' success of last season was a blessing and a curse for coach Steve Sarkisian and staff, as the bright lights allowed the team's top players to receive tons of attention from NFL scouts and depart for the draft as a result.

The Longhorns have had no choice but to reload through the portal, and reload they have. Texas has added receivers like five-star Alabama transfer Isaiah Bond and Houston transfer Matthew Golden along with UTSA edge Trey Moore and Clemson safety Andrew Mukuba, to name a few. Eight total transfer additions so far this offseason has given Texas the No. 7 portal class in the country, per 247Sports' rankings.

Texas Longhorns wide receiver Isaiah Bond during football spring practice.

Ricardo B. Brazziell/American-Statesman

The spring transfer window for FBS begins on Tuesday, April 16 and ends two weeks later on April 30, giving the coaching staff another chance to add depth. When speaking to the media on Tuesday, Sarkisian didn't reveal his plans but admitted he has "an idea" for how the Longhorns will approach the new portal window.

“I have an idea, internally,” Sarkisian said. “We’re gonna have some real discussions as a staff here in the next week or so, because I want to coach the guys that we got. I do think we’ve got a really talented team.

"Got great depth on this team, it’s incredible right now that we’re two-spotting everything and we’re four-deep at every position, which is great that we’re able to do that. Naturally, I don’t know if I’m necessarily going to the portal to say we’ve got to get something, but I’m sure as we’ll monitor there will be some decent players that go in, and then do they fit us."

During the run to the College Football Playoff this past season, Sarkisian put an emphasis on culture and leadership, which arguably played the biggest factor in Texas' success just two years removed from a 5-7 season. He admitted that it can be a challenge recruiting the portal due to the short time you have to getting to know the person, not just the player, but that's not stopping him from keeping the program's culture intact as priority No. 1.

"One of the challenges with the portal which we touched on a week ago, is how do you get to know the player, not just what’s on tape, but the person," Sarkisian said. "We try to do our best around here not to sacrifice character for talent, meaning yeah he’s a really good player, but maybe some of the off-the-field issues don’t match up with the player. We’ve got such a good culture right now and I think that’s part of the reason why we win. We just want to make sure that we do our homework on anybody that we bring into the program this late in the game.”

No one would be surprised if the Longhorns add a name or two from the portal during the upcoming window, but any incoming player wouldn't be integrated in time to be able to play in the Orange-White Spring Game on Saturday, April 20.

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