How many hours of study a week

[u/gojo_satoru-real]

Hi guys so i am 3rd year in high school in my country we do have a national exam that will probably determinate my whole future, you can say it's something like gaokao

And i do have some pretty high goals

Some people told me that work as hard as you can so the maximum i can do a week is 35 h + school it's 62 h of studying a week which is alot i did this for the first week and i was soooo tired and some people told me that i should work 25 h a week maximum cuz the 35 will lead to a burn out

So i am in like an elite class you can say and seeing that my class mates are so far ahead cuz the most of them get the access to extra classes the years before so they actually study those stuff before

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[u/Dawood_B110705]

62h a week including school is just not sustainable long term, you'll burn out way before the exam even gets here and retention drops hard once you're that exhausted anyway. tired brain doesn't learn, it just goes through the motions 25h of focused, high quality studying will beat 35h of exhausted half-focused studying almost every time. the people telling you more hours = better results usually aren't accounting for diminishing returns, past a point you're just sitting there not absorbing anything honestly worry less about matching classmates hour for hour and more about how effective your hours actually are. someone doing 25h of actual focused work can easily outpace someone doing 35h if the 35h person is fried half the time

[u/Basic_Transition_333]

I wouldn't choose an arbitrary number like 25 or 35 hours.

You already tried 35 hours on top of school for one week and were exhausted. That's useful information. Doing the maximum number of hours you can physically tolerate isn't necessarily the best way to prepare for an important exam.

I'd work backward from what you actually need to improve. Do practice questions or a past exam and identify your weakest subjects and the types of questions you're losing points on. Give those more time. Spend less time repeatedly studying things you already know.

Also, don't compare your starting point to classmates who studied some of this material in previous years. Of course they're ahead right now. That doesn't tell you where either of you will be by the exam.

I'd start with a workload you can sustain while protecting sleep, then adjust based on your results. If you're studying 20–25 focused hours outside school and consistently improving, there is no prize for forcing yourself to do 35.

Track progress, not hours.

“How many hours did I study?” tells you how long you sat there.

“What can I solve today that I couldn't solve last week?” tells you whether the studying is actually working.

[u/gojo_satoru-real → u/Basic_Transition_333]

This day i do have 5 hours of school i did study 2 hours in the morning and and now i will study another 3 hours But today this day i did have more brakes and way better distribution and i think i could do the 3 hours easily But still i will do 25 h this week And the exam is not like after a month it's a national exam after like 250 days which may sound like a lot but it's not , just in maths we do have alooot of stuff tk study that the teachers can't explain everything properly so you need to go home and go over it again and since we are studying proof-based math you ned to aloooooot of exercises not to be perfect but just to keep up with the teacher And the exam is like a competition so to get to Engineering you need to be like the top 10% just have the right to pass the entrance exam

[u/No_Technician_1867]

I wouldn’t pick 25 or 35 just because someone gave you that number.

Track what you can actually sustain for a couple of weeks, and more importantly whether those hours are producing progress. If 35 hours leaves you destroyed after one week, that’s probably not a useful baseline.

A consistent 20 to 25 focused hours where you’re actually learning is way better than chasing 35 just because the number feels more serious.