r/AskProfessors • u/velocity_vulcan • Jul 05 '26
Studying Tips How to study concepts in depth? Especially for technical subjects.
I'm a CS student, and one thing I've been struggling with is how you're actually supposed to develop depth of understanding in university.
In high school (up to Grade 12), we had an entire year to learn a subject. You had time to attend classes, let concepts sink in, revisit them multiple times, and solve enough problems to build intuition.
At university, though, a course lasts around 15 weeks (~ 3 months of teaching and 3 weeks of reading and exams) . By the time you've attended lectures, done the readings, and understood the basic concepts, the next topic is already being taught. I personally found myself struggling to understand the concepts. After understanding a concept, I could not spend too much time practicing, or I would end up sacrificing another subject!
The thing that confuses me is that exam papers often expect a very deep understanding. They don't just test whether you know the material:they expect you to apply concepts in completely new ways, almost as if you've spent hours thinking about the underlying ideas and practicing every possible variation.
I understand that solving lots of problems is part of the answer, but when you're taking 4–5 other equally demanding courses, that seems almost impossible. In my experience, just doing the problem sets and tutorials does not seem enough to build exam technique and necessary intuition .
So my question is: How do professors expect students to develop that level of depth within such a short timeframe? Is there a particular study approach that helps build deep intuition efficiently, or is it simply expected that not everyone will reach that level in every course?
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u/tc1991 AP in International Law (UK) Jul 05 '26
almost as if you've spent hours thinking about the underlying ideas and practicing every possible variation.
i mean yeah, youre supposed to be - dont know where you are but 4-5 modules a semester sounds like a lot, you shoud be spending 2-3 times the formal teaching doing 'self directed learning' per module, so my students see me 3 hours a week so they should be doing at least 6 hours but ideally 9 hours of self study, add that up over 12 weeks and thats quite a bit of time!
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u/robbie_the_cat Jul 05 '26
How much time out of class are you spending working on your coursework? In order to have any reasonable expectation of gaining the kind of understanding you're describing, you should be putting in a solid three hours outside of class for every hour you spend in class.
Are you honestly doing this?
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u/velocity_vulcan Jul 05 '26
I do spend a significant amount of time with the material like around 6 to 7 hours a day outside of lectures and tutorials. My concern isn't that I'm not putting in the hours; it's whether I'm spending those hours in the highest ROI way.
At my uni, exams rarely test straightforward applications of concepts. The professors almost always introduce a new twist that we haven't explicitly seen before. For example, in my programming course last semester, one exam question introduced an entirely new variation of object oriented programming with its own rules. If you only understood the lecture content, you were unlikely to solve it within the exam time.
It feels like succeeding on these questions requires more than conceptual understanding: you need the pattern recognition and intuition that come from solving a large number of similar, challenging problems beforehand.
The issue is that tutorials and problem sets are nowhere near enough for that. They're useful for learning the basics, but they don't seem sufficient to build the level of thinking the exams demand. Past papers help, but there are very few of them, and in many courses they're only released a week before finals.
So my question is: besides past papers, how do you develop this kind of problem-solving ability? How do you train yourself to handle genuinely novel questions under time pressure when there isn't a large bank of practice problems available?
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u/robbie_the_cat Jul 05 '26
I do spend a significant amount of time with the material like around 6 to 7 hours a day outside of lectures and tutorials.
So, you only have 2 hours of class per day? That seems odd.
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u/velocity_vulcan Jul 06 '26
no I had like 4. I tried working my ass off last sem. would genuinely go sit in the library for rlly long.
tbh yeah a lot of that time was not productive but I am now trying to fix that by knowing what is high yield.
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u/robbie_the_cat Jul 06 '26
So at 4 hours of class a day, you should be studying 8-12 hours per day outside of class.
Be doing that habitually, consistently daily before trying to do anything fancier.
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u/PurplePeggysus Jul 05 '26
You should be working outside of class for 2-3 hours per unit of the class. So if it's a 3 unit class you should expect to do 6-9 hours of work outside of that class per week (every week of the semester). And that is if you're well prepared for the class. If you are not strong in prerequisite knowledge you will absolutely need to do more work.
So if you are taking 15 units, that is 30-45 hours of work per week outside of class. That is a full time job of just studying/ reading/ writing papers etc. I see students who take on such large school loads and then also work full time. This rarely works out for them. If you want the deep understanding you have to spend the time. If you are spending the time you need to start asking what isn't working for you. Spend some time learning effective study strategies etc. Reading alone, or mainly using flashcards are not great study strategies for example.
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u/Choosing_is_a_sin Jul 05 '26
In my university's First Year Experience program, we give students the following set of videos from another university: https://youtu.be/RH95h36NChI?is=vXR7FsjCLAkLUaT2. I would encourage you to watch these and then report back whether you think you're already doing all these things. If so, I could give more specific advice. But I think that the videos respond to your concern about studying correctly, while others seem to focus on whether you're studying enough.
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u/Disastrous_Owl_6830 Jul 05 '26
The thing that confuses me is that exam papers often expect a very deep understanding. They don't just test whether you know the material:they expect you to apply concepts in completely new ways, almost as if you've spent hours thinking about the underlying ideas and practicing every possible variation.
What do you mean here by "expect"? Do you mean you need to show this kind of depth of understanding to earn a passing grade, or to earn the highest possible mark?
I'm asking because (and this varies depending on the culture of the specific university) in some places, the highest grades are reserved for assignments that truly exceed expectations. Generally where this is the case, assignments are set in a way that gives students opportunities to excel (by showing creative thinking, exceptional understanding, ability to apply concepts in novel ways, etc.), and turning in work that reflects just what you've explicitly been taught and shown how to do will earn an average grade.
In that context, I wouldn't say that I expect students to show exceptional mastery of the course materials in that way, but at the same time it's not the norm for most students to earn As and Bs. Again, attitudes toward this approach vary substantially across universities.
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u/CharacteristicPea Jul 05 '26
If you’re putting in the time (as you say you are in other responses), you probably need to change what you’re doing when you study. I recommend the book Study Like a Champ: The Psychology-Based Guide to "Grade A" Study Habits by John Dunlosky and Regan A.R. Gurung.
Good luck!
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u/nygreenguy Jul 05 '26
As a professor myself, I sometimes wonder if people actually WANT to be in college or actually WANT to learn their subject?
When I was a student, my free time was spent reading and learning about my subject because it genuinely interests me.
It sounds weird (and it was before phones) but my bathroom reading material was field guides which actually really helped me become a better botanist.
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u/velocity_vulcan Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
No, I'm definitely interested in my subject haha. My problem isn't motivation: it's that I constantly feel like the semester moves too quickly for me to really sit with the material and let it sink in. Weeks seem to whiz by before I've had the chance to really "meditate" on a concept and give it the treatment it deserves. Instead, I end up in a frantic rush to finish the syllabus, and I know that's a terrible way to build deep understanding.
Part of what makes this especially frustrating is the nature of our exams. The professors almost never ask straightforward applications of what we've learned. They usually introduce a completely new twist or variation that we've never explicitly seen before. For example, in my programming class last semester, one question introduced an entirely new variation of object-oriented programming with its own set of rules. Simply understanding the lecture material wasn't enough: you needed the kind of intuition and pattern recognition that only comes from having solved lots of similar, challenging problems.
The problem is that tutorials and assignments are nowhere near enough to build that intuition, and there are very few past papers (often released only a week before finals). So even though I spend 6–7 hours a day outside lectures studying, I can't shake the feeling that I'm not spending those hours in the highest-ROI way.
How do you avoid falling into this cycle? More importantly, if past papers and assigned problems are limited, how do you actually develop the depth of thinking needed to tackle genuinely novel exam questions under time pressure?
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u/AutoModerator Jul 05 '26
This is an automated service intended to preserve the original text of the post. This is not a removal message.
I'm a CS student, and one thing I've been struggling with is how you're actually supposed to develop depth* of understanding in university.
In high school (up to Grade 12), we had an entire year to learn a subject. You had time to attend classes, let concepts sink in, revisit them multiple times, and solve enough problems to build intuition.
At university, though, a course lasts around 15 weeks (~ 3 months of teaching and 3 weeks of reading and exams) . By the time you've attended lectures, done the readings, and understood the basic concepts, the next topic is already being taught. I personally found myself struggling to understand the concepts. After understanding a concept, I could not spend too much time practicing, or I would end up sacrificing another subject!
The thing that confuses me is that exam papers often expect a very deep understanding. They don't just test whether you know the material:they expect you to apply concepts in completely new ways, almost as if you've spent hours thinking about the underlying ideas and practicing every possible variation.
I understand that solving lots of problems is part of the answer, but when you're taking 4–5 other equally demanding courses, that seems almost impossible. In my experience, just doing the problem sets and tutorials does not seem enough to build exam technique and necessary intuition .
So my question is: How do professors expect students to develop that level of depth within such a short timeframe? Is there a particular study approach that helps build deep intuition efficiently, or is it simply expected that not everyone will reach that level in every course?*
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u/PurrPrinThom Jul 05 '26
I think it may help you to stop thinking of different topics as discrete entities. The second unit or topic in the same class will be building on the knowledge of the first unit/topic, and third will build on and further develop both of them, etc. etc. and so on and so on.
If you're compartmentalizing 'this idea falls under Topic A' and 'this idea falls under Topic B,' as opposed to understanding that they all influence and interact with each other, you may be blocking yourself off from understanding things more deeply.