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Social science students study way less than STEM, and the remaining subjects even less than social science. Also students at easier to get into colleges study less than at more prestigious ones. So likely your experience wasn't very representative, unless you studied something normal at an average university instead of STEM at a higher end one.

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I think you're correct that experience will differ substantially by context. I think your particular generalizations might hold enough to show up in a regression but there's enough other stuff going on (and noise) that they won't be tremendously predictive in individual cases.

I was a STEM major, did well at a reasonable school, and the only time I felt like I had way the hell more homework than I could get through was at a community college when I signed up for a Literature course and a Political Science course the same summer.

Yeah, I was trying to make sense of the graph in the article, because even if I were carrying only 3 STEM classes per semester (sometimes it was more), then class plus at least 1 lab would come out to 10 hours per week, but these classes typically had problem sets we spent 4-5 hours on each week, so that's almost 25 hours per week before we count the other 2 classes I didn't mention, or study for exams. And if it was programming, most would have similar workloads, but some were notorious, so a single graphics or operating systems class might demand 15-20 hours of programming outside of class time the entire semester!

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