GET YOUR A's GET YOUR ZZZ's
Sleep and College Students
According to the 2006 NCHA (National College Health Assessment), 62% of University of Utah students reported to have suffered from some sort of sleep difficulty. Over half of those students suffered academically as a result. In an attempt to adjust to the grueling demands of college, students often put sleep on the back burner while school, jobs, family, and friends are higher priorities. However, it is interesting to note, that college students are often unaware that the less sleep they get, the lower their GPA tends to be.
Voluntary sleep deprivation is a common occurrence for many college students, who often partially deprive themselves of sleep during the week and compensate by increasing their sleep time over the weekend. This pattern of sleep deprivation and rebound becomes more pronounced around examination periods, sometimes resulting in 24 to 48 hours of total sleep deprivation. By depriving themselves of sleep, college students are not only increasing their feelings of sleepiness during the day, thus decreasing their ability to pay attention in class, but are also negatively affecting their ability to perform on exams. In a study by Pilcher and Walters, researchers took a large group of students and divided them into two subgroups. In one of the groups they allowed students to go about their daily routine and then they were allowed to sleep 8 hours. The other group went about their day but they were not allowed to sleep. At the end of the 8 hour period, they had both groups of students take a cognitive test. What researchers found was that the students who didn’t sleep did significantly worse then did the students who received 8 hours of sleep. What’s more is that the sleep deprived students inaccurately rated their performance as better than that of students who were not sleep deprived. In another study by Trockel, Barnes, and Egget, researchers found that over a long period of time, the more sleep deprived a student was, their GPA decreased about 0.115 points.
