Thoughts on studying...

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Narrow course of study in standard study time?

All courses are awarded credit points according to the workload expected for them. Each credit point corresponds to approximately 30 hours of concentrated working time. This means that in a semester with 30 CP, around 900 working hours are accumulated. This corresponds to 34.6 hours of work per week (every week, 26 weeks long, no vacation!) or - with 2 weeks of vacation - 37.5 hours per week.

After 6 semesters, you will have accumulated 5400 hours (180 CP) of work. If you complete your studies in this time and with this amount of work, you will have just completed the absolute minimum that your university considers necessary for a Bachelor's degree. A narrow course of study, but within the standard period of study.

This success is then put into perspective by the grades, because you certainly haven't really understood a subject if you've got a 2.7. That's not even "good". If this happens in several subjects, you can clearly state that your studies were not successful, because you did not achieve essential learning objectives.

The real average study time in the department is currently a little under 10 semesters. This includes a part-time job, leisure and vacation activities and perhaps one or two additional (yes: voluntary) lectures...

It therefore seems obvious that you should ideally plan your studies for a duration of around 8 semesters (instead of 6) right from the start and thus ensure that your planning is realistic and can be successfully implemented.

Please bear in mind that planning for 6 semesters does NOT work for the vast majority of students and therefore leads to frustration and additional stress, even though the course was completely normal and predictable. This can also result in lower grades (poorer understanding of the material) and possibly also repeat examinations. Is it wise to bring this about?

Achieving the class goal

Please note thatlearning is an active process that a lecture can stimulate and support, but what ultimately takes place inyour head - no one else has any influence on that but you! Consequently, you have to take care of it yourself!

Each lecture conveys factual and methodological knowledge ("knowledge"); you must learn the associated skills or competencies yourself during the semester.

Understanding the entirety of the material/content is normally the aim of a lecture. You can find out what this involves, for example, in the list of learning objectives in the module handbook entry. It seems obvious that you must be able to understand and use everything; the grade at the end will tell you how well. Important here: The grade is not intended to indicate that you can only do parts of the material - in which case you have simply not achieved the objective - but how well you have mastered all parts (see also the section below on the meaning of grades). Otherwise you will accumulate gaps.

In practice, however, you can achieve a grade better than 5.0 even with gaps in the material. Don't let this fool you: You keep the gaps in the end!

The importance of mediocre grades

TED is a web platform where free talks are presented by many people who have something to say to everyone else. It's always worth taking a look. I was struck by a talk by Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy platform, which is also free. This talk is actually about making videos available for learning (this does not necessarily mean recordings of lectures), but that is not the point here. Here is a link to the article that is being referred to:

www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

The crucial insight comes at about minute 7. You should watch it!