Assessing the student academic workload in the learning process of a technical university

Abstract

The article deals with an assessment of the students' workload influence on the academic progress in a technical university. This study was carried out at Tyumen Industrial University, the Branch of IUT in Surgut. The research participants were the first-year students of full-time and part-time departments of the "Oil and Gas Business" direction. The research was done in 2017-2018. Much attention is given to some of the consequences that first-year students have: neuropsychic stress, declining academic progress, and the quality of education. There are reasons for such a state: lack of time, a large amount of information, many classroom hours, irregular distribution of the students' workload intensity of academic disciplines in the first semester, etc. The research gives valuable information on the necessity to improve the system of students' organizational and educational activities, depending on the specific features of a technical university. This study contributes to the existing research on the impact of academic workload on the students' emotional, mental state in higher education. Specifically, it studies the volume of the freshmen's academic workload in accordance with the curriculum, which is one of the main negative factors affecting the level of mental students' performance.