Thoughts on studying...

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Narrow-track studies in a standard period of study?

All courses are assigned credit points according to the workload assumed for them. Each credit point corresponds to about 30 hours of concentrated working time. Thus, in a semester with 30 CP, about 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 effort , you have just received the absolute minimum that seems necessary to your university to a bachelor title. A narrow track study, but in the standard study time.

This success is then put into perspective by the grades, because you certainly haven't really understood a subject if you get a 2.7 . That is not even "good". If this happens in several subjects, one can probably clearly state that the study was not successful, because essential learning objectives were not proven.

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

It seems to be obvious that you should ideally plan your studies from the beginning for a duration of about 8 semesters (instead of 6) and thus make sure that your planning is realistic and can be successfully implemented.

Please keep in mind that planning for 6 semesters does NOT work out for the vast majority of students, leading to exasperation and additional stress, even though the process was quite normal and predictable. Lower grades (lower understanding of material) and possibly retakes may also result. Is it wise to bring this on?

Achieve the class target

Please note thatlearning is an active action , which a lecture can indeed stimulate and support, but what ultimately takes place inyour head - no one other than you has any influence on it! In consequence: You have to take care of it yourself!

Each lecture provides 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 usually the goal of a lecture. What all belongs to it, you will find e.g. in the learning objectives list of the module handbook entry. It seems obvious that you have to understand and be able to use everything in each case ; how well, that is what the grade says at the end. Important here: The grade is not meant to tell you that you can only do parts of the material - in which case you simply have not met the objective - but how well you have mastered all parts  (see also section below on the meaning of grades). Otherwise, you accumulate gaps.

In practice, however, you can achieve a grade better than 5.0 even with gaps in the material. Do not 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 having a look. One that caught my eye is a talk by Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, another free platform. This talk is actually about making videos available for learning (this doesn't necessarily mean recordings of lectures), but that's not the point here. Here's a link to the post it's talking about:

www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

The key insight comes at about minute 7. You should check it out!