Many factors affect the impact of homework on a student’s mental well being.  Many students have outside obligations that take up time and create physical and mental stress, and adding a few hours of homework every night only creates more burnout.

According to University of San Diego professor Joseph Lathan: “Research showed that excessive homework is associated with high stress levels, physical health problems and lack of balance in children’s lives; 56 % of the students in the study cited homework as a primary stressor in their lives.”

Freshman Luke Grzyb participates in a lot of extracurricular activities that take up a lot of time:

“Right now, it’s hockey season, and most days I come home, I’ll leave it around six or like 6:30 depending on what time I practice is to go to the weight room, and then I’ll go skate on the ice, get hockey practice on, and then I’ll be home at like 10 o’clock, 9 sometimes.”

On top of that, he gets a ton of homework, which further keeps him busy throughout the week:  “It definitely varies throughout the week, but on a day that I have a good amount of homework, I’d say an hour to two hours of productive work.”

All together, it’s a lot: “I think that what I really have time for right now is just homework and sports, and sometimes I don’t even finish my homework before my sports. So I’ll get home on these late nights at like, 9:30 and I have to finish up, rushing, stressed out about it. I don’t really have any time to chill before my practices. I’m kind of just always working, going from school to homework to sports.”

This is the start of the stress, both physical, and mental that some students deal with a heavy homework load go through.

Another Freshman, Ozark Ulreich does not necessarily feel the same stress from the homework load: “It depends on the time. I actually do a lot of homework done at school, but I spend about half or maybe a quarter of my lunch doing homework. When I get home, I usually spend 30 minutes to 40 minutes working on homework.”

Ulreich prioritizes getting his homework done:  “Sometimes, I’ll skip out on some me-time, but that’s usually because I want to study for a quiz/test.”

He’s also not a procrastinator.

“I like to do work when it is assigned. I work fast,” he said. 

But is spending all that time on homework even beneficial to students?  According to the evidence compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, maybe not: “After around four hours of homework per week, the additional time invested in homework has a negligible impact on performance.”

Although there may be a limit on the sheer amount of homework that is beneficial, the evidence doesn’t negate the value of homework as a form of practice and preparation, a point many teachers  strongly advocate, and that even some students have to admit is true.

Even Grzyb agreed that there are positives to homework:  “I definitely think it has a big, positive impact on my test scores. For example, in eighth grade last year when I was in Algebra, the homework was never mandatory, but my teacher always gave it to us. So in the beginning of the year, I thought that I didn’t need to get the homework done. Afterwards, I could see that my grades were definitely worse. And then later on in the year, when I started to do these homeworks, I actually started to get a lot better grades, and so I think that homework is really good practice for these testing quizzes. And once you’re able to do your homework and you do all of it, then I think it definitely possibly impacts your test grades.”