Most college students are used to hearing that if they get a good night\u2019s sleep before test day, they\u2019ll score higher.
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But a new MIT study<\/a> finds that it\u2019s not that simple. According to the study, students need quality, consistent sleep throughout a semester to reach their academic peak. Whether they sleep well or not the night before a test doesn\u2019t really matter. \u201cWe’ve heard the phrase \u2018Get a good night\u2019s sleep, you’ve got a big day tomorrow.\u2019 It turns out this does not correlate at all with test performance. Instead, it\u2019s the sleep you get during the days when learning is happening that matter most,\u201d Jeffrey Grossman<\/a>, a professor of computational computer science at MIT and co-author of the study, said in a statement<\/a>. Surprisingly, this study wasn\u2019t originally meant to be on sleep at all. Instead, Grossman was trying to find a link between exercise and better academic performance of students in his solid-state chemistry class. So, he asked 100 of his students to wear Fitbits (88 actually did) and enrolled 22 of them in an intense fitness class for a semester. But after the semester ended, Grossman and his co-authors surprisingly found no significant difference in the academic performance of those who took the fitness class and those who didn\u2019t. However, they did discover another trend. Fitbits can also detect periods of sleep and changes in sleep quality. And when the researchers graphed the amount of sleep students received along with their semester grades, they noticed that, overall, the students who slept longer, had better quality sleep, and had a more regular sleep schedule over the course of the semester received the best grades. \u201cOf course, we knew already that more sleep would be beneficial to classroom performance, from a number of previous studies that relied on subjective measures like self-report surveys,\u201d Grossman said in a statement. \u201cBut in this study the benefits of sleep are correlated to performance in the context of a real-life college course, and driven by large amounts of objective data collection.\u201d Sleep “really, really matters,” he added. College students have perpetually late bedtimes. With all of the late-night study sessions, enticing parties and midnight dorm room chats, college students often don\u2019t find themselves going to sleep until around 1 a.m. <\/a> But luckily, as long as students regularly go to bed before 2 a.m., there won\u2019t be a significant effect on their grades, the researchers found. However, 2 a.m. is the cutoff point. If students go to bed later than that, they can expect to see a dropoff in academic performance, no matter how many hours of sleep they get. \u201cWhen you go to bed matters,\u201d Grossman said in a statement. \u201cIf you get a certain amount of sleep \u2014 let\u2019s say seven hours \u2014 no matter when you get that sleep, as long as it\u2019s before certain times, say you go to bed at 10, or at 12, or at 1, your performance is the same. But if you go to bed after 2, your performance starts to go down even if you get the same seven hours. So, quantity isn\u2019t everything.\u201d Overall, the researchers found that sleep habits accounted for 25 percent of the variations in students’ grades, which is huge.
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<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe study <\/strong>
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<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen you go to sleep also matters<\/strong>
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<\/p>\n\n\n\nSleep has a surprisingly large effect on grades <\/strong>
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