Alarming mornings

Always nice when research confirms what I have suspected for years: early exams are a bad idea. Students perform worse when they have to take exams early in the morning, according to recent — not yet published — research (in Dutch) by the University of Groningen. For exams scheduled between eight and half past nine in the morning, students received lower grades on average than for exams later in the day. Even the pass rate was slightly lower. And I suspect that the negative effects of too little sleep are not limited to exams, but apply to study activities in general.

Amid all the poster frenzy on campus last week for the student council elections, I did miss one thing: attention to getting enough sleep. Student life is — more than the phase that comes after it — a recipe for sleep deprivation. Drinks, committee obligations, and social activities tend to take place during the week, because by Friday afternoon half the campus has emptied as people go to visit their parents.

Add to that the housing shortage, which forces students to keep living with their parents for longer and often leaves them with a longer commute. During the first year of my degree, I travelled back and forth between Amsterdam and Delft and had to leave the house at half past seven every morning to make it to lectures on time. Since I usually did not get home before midnight after an evening at my student association, I was permanently tired. When Covid broke out halfway through that year, I first slept for a week.

I do not fall asleep before midnight; I am simply not tired yet

Fortunately, since moving to Delft, I do sleep more. But I remain an evening person. I do not fall asleep before midnight; I am simply not tired yet. The fact that I have to be on campus again at nine every morning is because the university expects that of me. As neurobiologist Brankele Frank wrote in FD (in Dutch)  earlier this year: “[evening people have to] participate in a society that pretends nine o’clock is a neutral starting point.” And it is not.

By now, it is well known that sleep deprivation is extremely unhealthy. Last year, UMCG research showed that evening people are more likely to experience cognitive decline than morning people. Strikingly, this difference was found mainly among highly educated people. The researcher attributed this to their sleep rhythm: “They are often people who have to go to work again early in the morning and therefore get too little sleep more often, giving their brains too little rest.” I suspect that evening activities combined with early lectures have much the same effect on the average student.

The only time I ever overslept for an appointment with a supervisor at TU Delft, the immediate response was: “Aren’t you doing too many degree programmes?” Perhaps a better question would have been: “Why are we making you start before ten in the first place?” If we know that sleep deprivation is unhealthy, and even leads to measurably lower grades in early-morning exams, why do we not arrange timetables differently? Of course, I know that makes scheduling even more of a nightmare, but the gain in concentration, health and mood seems well worth the puzzle.