That may be difficult to do with a kid who is pre-med or pre-law, or attends a college where his/her possible majors are competitive admission by college GPA (and possibly other factors). Such students need to carefully manage their GPAs, which discourages them from taking harder optional courses.
One key to success – start your homework assignments the day they are assigned, not the day they are due! (A lesson I am still struggling to master.)
TIME MANAGEMENT. This is one of the most difficult things to adapt to in college. Unlike high school, in which the students typically attend the same courses at fixed hours every weekday, college class schedules can be quite variegated. A student may attend a lecture 3 times per week for an hour each time and a discussion section for the same course on another day; another course might meet two times per week for two hours each time; still another might have lectures plus labs or seminars. Nothing like a “8-3” high school day, followed by ECs, followed by “homework” at HOME.
So when do you study? When do you get a chance for recreation? For clubs? For going to a concert? And most importantly, when do you do your homework? How much time should you plan on spending on homework per course?
The summer before I started college, I read a book about time management. Here was one “rule of thumb”: you can expect to spend 2 to 3 hours outside of class doing homework for every hour you spend in class. Since I was taking 15 credit hours of courses each semester (which amounted to about 15 hours in class), I had to expect to spend 30 to 45 hours OUTSIDE of class reading, doing research, practicing, writing, or whatever assignments there were. Class meeting time plus homework therefore meant a 45 to 60 hour “work week.” That’s a lot, right? Well remember there are 168 hours in a week (24 x 7). So even if you’re working 68 hours, you have another 100 hours for everything else: play, eating, hanging out, watching a film, etc. 100 hours per week is about 14 hours per day during which you do NOT have to be doing your reading and other school work. Plenty of time for sleep,too – IF you plan your working time carefully.
However, you can’t do all of those 30-45 hours of homework on weekends alone. You have to find ways to fit most of it into “weekdays” (between classes go back to your dorm, to the library, to some other place where you can work without too much distraction). Besides, often big events happen on weekends and you don’t want to be working 15 hour days on Saturday and Sunday. This means that before, in-between, and after your scheduled classes on Monday through Friday you need to do your homework. If you have an hour or two between classes on a particular day, spend that time on homework, prep, practice, or whatever is needed.
To help with time management, you should have a “daily planner” or an electronic calendar in which you not only put in your scheduled class meetings, club meetings, and so forth, but you also put in your homework and study times. That planner should also include every due date for papers, reports, and exams for the semester.
No electronic calendars in my day, but I did keep a daily calendar in a little spiral notebook. And I stuck to it. That helped me to make decisions about whether it was wise to just hang out for a few hours with friends or whether instead I needed to work. I found that rule of thumb that I mentioned above to be pretty accurate: 2-3 hours of homework outside of class for every classroom meeting hour.
Finally, a story. Way back when, a man named C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a little book called “Parkinson’s Law” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law). The basic principle of Parkinson’s Law is that “work expands to fill the available time.” The more open time you have available, the more likely you are to stretch out your hours working on a project (or perhaps procrastinating, working, procrastinating, etc.). There are variants of this idea, but what it means is that to avoid succumbing to Parkinson’s Law you need to have a plan for how many hours you will spend on a given assignment or project. Set some deadlines, benchmarks, interim goals, etc. Readjust those times if need be, but don’t just go about your work without some kind of plan.
If you read the Wikipedia article that I linked just now you’ll find some variations on the idea of Parkinson’s Law. I discovered an unexpected variant when I was having a telephone conversation with my daughter during her freshman year at RISD. It was a Wednesday afternoon. She had to subject her work to a “crit” on Friday afternoon, and was working very hard on a project that her fellow students (peer review!) and the course instructor would critique and maybe tear apart. She had been working hard and was nearly exhausted. I asked her, “How many hours do you have to work on the project until the crit?” Her answer, “48.” What, what, what? How could she spend 48 hours – more than a standard 40-hour work week! – on the project when there were only 2 days left to complete it? Answer: Parkinson’s Law in Reverse (my term): “Time expands to allow you to do the necessary work.” Sure she had to have some food, take a shower, maybe a nap or two, etc. But when you have a hard deadline, what you may have to cut back on is sleep! It was indeed possible for her to finish her assignment in 48 hours. She proved it.