Study: Better sleep habits lead to better college grades (2019)
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
The study provided evidence that people who have good grades on average tend to get “better” sleep on average (according to whatever criteria FitBit’s sleep tracking feature uses) than those who have worse grades. It doesn’t provide evidence for any stronger statement than that; just that good grades and quality of sleep seem to tend to go together.
It certainly doesn’t provide any evidence to support the title’s claim “Better sleep habits lead to better college grades”; that changing sleeping habits improves grades.
That would be an interesting study if anyone finds a way to get it past the ethics panels.
I spent most of my degree goofing off with the regular interruptions of sitting in lectures, writing notes, and maybe review them once before taking a test.
I always made sure to get enough sleep to be mentally sharp. If I did that, the act of writing notes in the lecture was enough to lock the information in my head.
Later on in college when class got more difficult, my best friends and I would talk about what we learned each day. We taught each other our own subjects and teaching can be the best way to learn.
Not everyone is so fortunate to have the massive advantages I did. I had to be careful with money but never needed loans or a job. This let me focus solely on getting good enough grades to graduate.
The slides, are, I see, available, at http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.034f/sleep.pdf
The lesson is https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu... (the part warning the students about this potential pitfall in their method is at the end of the lesson).
> You don't learn without problem solving ... The custodians of knowledge about how much sleep you need[, a]nd what happens if you don't get it[,] is the United States Army. Because they're extremely interested in what happens when you cross 10 or 12 times zones, and have no sleep, and have to perform. ... [A]fter the first Gulf War, which was the most studied war in history, ... there were after action reports ... full of examples like this. The US Forces ... drawn up for the night ... up for about 36 hours straight ... [w]hen, much to their amazement, across their field-of-view came a column of Iraqi vehicles ... both sides enormously surprised. A firefight broke out ... in acts of fratricidal fire. And the interesting thing is that all these folks here swore in the after action reports that they were firing straight ahead. And what happened was their ability to put ordnance on target was not impaired at all. But their idea of where the target was, what the target was, whether it was a target, was all screwed up. So this led to a lot of experiments in which people were sleep deprived. ... These are Army Rangers. It doesn't get any tougher than this.
[T]hey had ... fire control teams ... their job is to take information from an observer, over here, about a target, over here. And tell the artillery, over here, where to fire. So they kept some of these folks up for 36 hours straight. And ... they all said, we're doing great. And at that time they were bringing fire down on hospitals, mosques, churches, schools, and themselves. Because, they couldn't do the calculations anymore, after 36 hours without sleep.
And now you say to me, well I'm a MIT student, I want to see the data. So let's have a look at the data. [Slides at http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.034f/sleep.pdf ] Very simple calculations you have to do in your head, like adding numbers, spelling words, and things like that ... after 72 hours without sleep, your performance relative to what you were at the beginning is about 30%. So loss of sleep destroys ability.
Sleep loss accumulates. So you say, well I need eight hours of sleep - and what you need, by the way, varies - but I'm going to get by with seven hours of sleep. So after 20 days of one hour's worth of sleep deprivation, you're down about 25%. ...
So you might say, well does caffeine help? Or ... naps in this case. And the answer is, yes, a little bit. Some people argue that you get the more effect out of the sleep that you do get if you divide it into two. Winston Churchill always took a three hour nap in the afternoon. He said that way he got a day and a half's worth of work out of every day. He got the full amount of sleep[, b]ut he divided it into two pieces. Here's the caffeine one. So caffeine does help.
And now you say, well, shoot, I think I'm going to take it kind of easy this semester. And I'll just work hard during the week before finals. Maybe I won't even bother sleeping for the 24 hours before the 6.034 final. That's OK. Well let's see what will happen. So let's work the numbers. Here is 24 hours. And that's where your effectiveness is after 24 hours. Now let's go over to the same amount of effectiveness on the blood alcohol curve. And it's about the level at which you would be legally drunk. So I guess what we ought to do is to check everybody as they come in for the 6.034 final, and arrest you if you've been 24 hours without sleep. And not let you take any finals again, for a year. So if you do all that, you might as well get drunk.
(Patrick Winston, lesson (#10) for the 6.034 - Artificial Intelligence course at the MIT, 2010)
Works until it doesn't.
Anyway, yes, I consider territories in which the use sleep deprived medical personnel is tolerated a strong sign of lack of civilization, when the important factor appears that some of them state "Yes we are used to it" (?! !!!) instead of, say, "We were unduly forced by understaffing" - that some of them have no idea of the difference is a huge alarm bell.
Every 4 hours, a nurse would bust in through the door so hard the door would bounce back almost like a western saloon, in they push their cart with computer, and YELL, "We are just gonna take the blood pressure!"
Occasionally, we did get one nurse who would do this with tact.
i’ve read people’s comments on some other forums (not here) blaming poor people for not studying or trying hard enough and that is the reason they are poor. which is obviously crazy to think that about everyone who comes from the lower class is lazy or not trying hard enough.
i am thinking about a lot commuters, who live at home because they can’t afford a dorm or an off campus apartment. i’ve met many people who would just stop going to college or lose multiple days only to find out the only car in the family broke and that persons grades were hurting so they later on ended up dropping out.
always good to understand where people may be coming from
This is an extremely common belief I’ve seen from my dad’s generation. His parents worked hard and succeeded, therefore anyone who didn’t succeed, didn’t work hard.
Secondary factors such as vicious circles of struggle, anxiety etc. aside.
I would perhaps rephrase this as "people who stimulate themselves enough that they stay up late have poor quality sleep".
I for sure experience this myself when I don't properly wind down my mind several hours before going to sleep.
> it’s the sleep you get during the days when learning is happening that matter most
> there appears to be a certain cutoff for bedtimes, such that going to bed later results in poorer performance, even if the total amount of sleep is the same ... if you go to bed after 2, your performance starts to go down even if you get the same seven hours
> those who got relatively consistent amounts of sleep each night did better
> The overall course grades for students averaging 6.5 hours of sleep were down 50% from other students who averaged just one hour more sleep. Similarly, those who had just a half-hour more night-to-night variation in their total sleep time had grades that dropped 45 percent below others with less variation.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall/ind...
Though I'm surprised that physical exercise did not correlate. Is positive effect on mental performance is well established in the literature. I suppose "more studies are needed" (which means "we don't know" in academia-speak).
At any given level of college education (undergrad, masters, etc.) the overwhelming majority of students will not be continuing in academia after that.
Edit: and spare me the low effort comments about GPA and internships, the overwhelming majority don't have those requirements and the overwhelming majority of those that do don't check.