negative effects of homework to college students revised

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Negative Effects of Homework to College Students
Introduction
In most colleges worldwide homework is considered a major part in the learning process with the intention of guiding the students and maintaining discipline. There is no learning institution where students are not assigned homework for it is considered a part of the learning process. Homework is mostly described as any type of work that instructors in the respective colleges assign to students to cover during their free time or non-school hours away from school. Homework is mostly given to students to enable them to understand a topic deeply that has already been covered in class or will be covered in the next class where there are given a topic and told to research it and present a well-researched research paper or a report(Astin, 1993). Although Homework is considered positively in learning, it has its own side effects on the students.
Negative effects of homework
The negative effects of Homework includes the following(Wachtel,1998):
Sleep deprivation
Even though homework is supposed to actively engage the student in learning. An excessive amount of homework given to the students leads to sleep deprivation where students spend a lot of time trying to complete their homework before going to bed. After a few hours of trying to complete the homework, the students becomes mentally tired and loses concentration where he or she now starts to try to get it done with no intention of trying to understand what it is all about.

Sleep deprivation leads to low ability for concentration due to mental fatigue. This makes the student struggling the next day on school trying to understand what the instructor is teaching.
Extracurricular activities, family and friends
Many students in colleges are involved in various extracurricular activities usually done after school hours. When the instructors give out homework, these students have to manage their time to perform these two activities simultaneously. In the case where there is too much homework to be done within a limited time frame, the students are forced to forego the extracurricular activity in order to complete the homework. The student also lacks time to spend their free time with his family members and friends. Most families have daily routines that they observe like eating and praying together. A lot of homework leads to a disruption in the routine where the student finds it hard to eat or pray together with his or her family. This impacts negatively on the student’s social life and active learning where the student becomes alienated from the society family and friends. Active learning occurs when students in the field come into contact with a real life situation that helps to put what they have learned into practice and encourage their participation.
Stress
The major effect of homework to college students is stress. This is common to students in the middle-class families where some of these students have part-time jobs that help them financially. This puts a lot of pressure on the student where he or she knows the job cannot be foregone and neither the homework for it counts in the total score leading to stress. This impacts heavily on the student sometimes leading to a bad depression. Stress is also caused by situations where different instructors in the same class give out homework with limited time duration without bothering to acknowledge that the students may have been given another homework by a different instructor with the same time frame, and the students are expected to complete all the homework within that time limit. The students face a dilemma on which homework to complete first bearing in mind that the homework marks will count at the end of the semester.
Cheating
Another negative effect of homework is that it encourages cheating in colleges where students view on the intended purpose of homework changes and they see it simply as a way of maintaining or raising their grades. This is the major problem faced by many colleges today where students search on the internet for articles relating to their homework and just copy them directly. Cheating occurs when students start copying each other’s homework another person’s work without acknowledging the author or the owner and submitting it to their instructors. The students who copy the assignments do not mostly know what the research was about and end up missing the benefit they were supposed to gain from undertaking the homework. This is unprofessional and leads to colleges producing graduates who are unqualified and unskilled in their various area of professionalism.
Conclusion
Although Homework has negative effects on students, on the bright side homework also play a major role in helping students understand more and perfect their skills and knowledge through homework. It also improves the knowledge retention capability of the student and gives the student a sense of responsibility and independence. It is through homework that students can explore for more answers than those given by their instructors and be able to put their learned skills in the class into practical use.
It is also through homework that instructors in colleges provide an alternative way for students to have a chance of raising their grades where the homework is set to be done at non-school time so that the students can have access to many unrestricted sources of information to read from unlike during exams where only the learnt knowledge by the student is applied under supervision. Homework can also be used as a communication tools to students through it being given to students as a form of punishment, facilitate communication between the students and their parents and help the school administrators fulfil their directives(Deci, 1991).
However, instructors should always consider the students and give out homework that is not that much time demanding in order to enable the students to value the purpose of assignments and to stop cheating and also be able to be actively engaged in extracurricular activities. The homework given should be easy for the student to understand and be able to do. In order for this to be effective, the instructors must communicate amongst themselves in order to know how much work each instructor should give the students and the time limit he or she should allocate for the submission of that homework. Instructors should try to understand students who fail to submit their homework on time due to various unforeseen challenges and problems like students who have part-time jobs.In conclusion homework is good when given in small amounts and in accordance with the level of education that is, a middle school student should not be given the same amount of homework as the college student.

Works cited
Astin, Alexander W. “What matters in college.” (1993).
Wachtel, Howard K. “Student evaluation of college teaching effectiveness: A brief review.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 23.2 (1998): 191-212.
Deci, Edward L., et al. “Motivation and education: The self-determination perspective.” Educational psychologist 26.3-4 (1991): 325-346.