Whats Your Study Hour's System
 

I'm curious to know what your system/plan for study hours is. Mainly what the punishment is for not completing them. In our chapter if you don't complete them your referred to standards board and they evaluate the situation and may or may not give you a penalty. Personally i think there should be a set monetary fee which increases linearly as you miss more and more study hours by increments of 10 study hours missed. How does your chapter regulate them and is it working?

Study hours are pretty pointless, a lot of the time. Either they turn into a social session or they are of little or no value as everyone has a different method of studying. Not to mention, if everyone doesn't gather at a central location they're impossible to enforce. The house is not always conducive to studying and study hours at the library or student center often raise the ire of non-members.

If the point of study hours is to increase your chapter's GPA, has it done so? If not, get rid of them. Give rewards for high individual GPAs and most improvement in GPA rather than forcing people to waste their time.

Hour's?

Study hours are dumb. They can *sometimes* be effective for brothers who aren't making grades, but to make your whole chapter do it is really a waste of everyone's time.

And "... your referred to ..."

I think they are hard to "enforce" and I've seen them become the bane of the scholarship chair's existence. There seems to be a lot of negativity surrounding them and they do tend to turn into social sessions. I think positive reinforcement and rewarding works better, and there should be some sort of intervention/assistance/mentoring for those with low grades.

Try starting with just encouraging people to actually attend class. I know...novel idea.

Y'all are really something else today...

It's Friday the 13th weekend.

I think giving study hours to those under the required GPA mandatory hours is fine. Otherwise it is of no use (unless during finals time)

Does the AY in your user name stand for Alpha Upsilon? As in the recently rechartered chapter of Theta Chi at Nebraska? Certainly you are in contact with many people at headquarters who could advise you on this matter. Eddie worked with your group, didn't he? I promise he's a better resource to you than randoms on the Internet.

You know everyone.

;)

Well our study hours are actually study hours and not social sessions. I posted the question to see how other chapters operate, not to ask who dislikes study hours. The worst thing about this website is that hardly anyone ever answers the original question.

It has nothing to do with "disliking" them - it has to do with people having EXPERIENCE and knowing THEY DON'T WORK.

The way other chapters operate, increasingly, is to not employ such a time-waster.

As everyone said it is a huge time-waster. I can count the number of times I actually studied at study hours on one hand. My chapter's study hours weren't mandatory (unless your GPA was low and you had to bring it up).

I loved study tables and my GPA went up when I was required to attend, so I ended up attending even when I wasn't required. I even set up a system for myself when I was in grad school.

But I was (and still am, I guess), a huge nerd. It didn't work for most of the rest of my chapter, but rewarding high GPAs and good performance on quizzes and exams, along with study skills tips and assistance with time management did work for lots of people.

In short - you can't rely on study hours (or I guess in this case "hour's") to do the hard work for you. Implement a full-on scholarship program and you'll probably see better results. Forcing someone to sit in a library for 2 hours a day "just cause" is pointless. There's no point in punishing folks for not attending if their GPA is still at or above the required GPA

AFAIK, my chapter only does study hours with pledges as part of Pledge Ed (there's a certain number of required study hours with an initiated sister). In theory it's a great idea, to make sure that schoolwork doesn't get neglected during the pledge term, but I can attest that certain degree programs would not lend themselves well to making study hours useful. For instance--I was in the music school and, much more often than not, had more practicing than written work to do (and I play the piano, not exactly a portable instrument). I could see the same issues for dance, theatre, architecture, art/design, etc. I wasn't asked to complete study hours as a pledge, since I was a founding mother, but I did supervise a few for the music students in my house, and it usually became a social gathering...

(Just something to think about, depending on the distribution of degree programs in your chapter!)

Has your chapter looked into swapping required hours? For example, if you are to do your hours in the library, is there an "exception" for folks with majors that require out of class lab time? My campus had a ton of health care majors, and I believe if people did extra lab hours (outside of what was required for class, but basically in preparation for exams) they were not required to complete all of their study hours.

Of course, lots of freshmen take a lot of gen eds which would require "traditional" study time. So it would depend on the courses they were taking, as well. You could work with faculty to devise the "optimal" study program for each major/year, but that's a lot of work. Of course, if your chapter doesn't have a full-on scholarship program, it might be worth the time. Depends on how big the chapter is and the diversity of majors.

Whatever, I'm a fan of study tables. I've already said that. Libraries are my safe space.

OP, please review the following link and then consider editing this thread's title.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe

The OP hasn't posted since May. (Maybe she's been in mandatory study hours.) And I thought only mods could edit thread titles.

But otherwise, Amen!

I can't believe I allowed a misplaced apostrophe to stand unchallenged in May. Where was I?

Okay then, never mind, I was on my game.

But what's going on with you today?

Fair point.

What my sorority did last semester was require sisters with lower GPA's to schedule one-on-one study sessions with one of the eboard members. (We're a tiny local sorority, which I'm sure is the only reason why that worked.) As an eboard member, though, that was a huge hassle. What kind of rewards and incentives have you guys done for high GPA's and good performance on exams?

Also, we currently have a sister on academic probation and we're not really sure how to help her. Anyone have any ideas?

That seems really unreasonable for your executive board. They're supposed to be leaders in the chapter, not babysitters.

Your "scholarship" or similar person should set up a study plan with her, with goals. They together (your scholarship person and the sister on probation) should go through all her courses, come up with a study plan that works for each of them based on the assignments for the syllabi (so that she's not freaking out over everything being due at once). Then they should meet monthly to go over progress. A lot of times when a sister is bombing LOTS of courses, it's a case of poor time management, rather than her not being able to hack it intellectually.

This will be relevant net week. The rest of this thread will never be relevant again.

In addition to the excellent suggestions from agzg, you could also pair her up with someone who is in the same major or can help her with the classes she struggles in, rather than random eboard people. You could help her find a tutor if nobody in the chapter can help- help her find the resources on campus.

Our study hour plan works pretty well. We make all hours pbserved either at the library or our chapter house. An individuals study hours depend on their last semesters GPA.
Here it is:
4.0-3.4 no hours
3.3-3.0 1 hour
2.9-2.5 2 hours
2.5-2.0 3 hours
2.0-0.0 5 hours

We have to complete these each week and if a member does not make hours the first time its a warning but the second time they get sent to standards.