OPINION

Intensity of CEGEP workload defeats the purpose

OPINION

Intensity of CEGEP workload defeats the purpose

Submitted by Camille Houde*

“We can do anything, not everything.”

~ David Allen, American author

Dear CEGEP,

Since the beginning of my schooling, I have always been in love with the learning process. However, my love has turned into resentment as I have been drowned in your workload. Indeed, the tremendous number of projects, homework and hours of study needed to obtain satisfying grades has gotten quickly and dangerously out of hand.

I am overwhelmed, and I am not the only one.

At first, I thought I was one of the few exceptions experiencing intense performance anxiety and severe sleep deprivation due to the merciless rate at which schoolwork accumulates. However, particularly around midterm, I started to hear about colleagues missing school because of burnout, unbearable headaches, depression and panic attacks. In fact, in 2013 (already!), College Bois-de-Boulogne, followed by seven other CEGEPs in Quebec, conducted a study revealing that 35.1 per cent of CEGEP students feel anxiety constantly during their studies (Ducharme and Gosselin, 2017).

There’s more. If we feel ill due to our anxiety and dare to skip one day of classes, there is no way you, CEGEP, are going to accommodate us: we will fall too far behind in the course and our workload will just get worse.

Thanks to all the assigned work, I am forced, along with many of my fellow students, to adopt an unbalanced lifestyle in order to check off everything on my school to-do list. I abandoned my hobbies – no more drawing photorealistic sketches and reading detective stories. I cancelled my Friday nights spent with my friends. I cut out my track and field training from my schedule. At some point, I reach a state where I’m just trying to survive. So, dear CEGEP, you should reconsider your purpose, because clearly you are not fulfilling it. Instead of building proactive and efficient citizens, you are transforming students into zombies, because it’s impossible to take a refreshing break outside of school.

On top of that, there is the pointless use of teamwork. All too often, instead of being shared, other students’ tasks are piled onto my workload. Don’t get me wrong, we always split the tasks evenly, but then someone forgets to do their part, someone is last minute, or someone has to drop everything to study for an exam – in short, everyone has the excuse to let me do the whole project. Call that teamwork! Some teachers tell us to let them know if that situation happens, but it is usually too late: I’ve already done all the work because the deadline was looming, and I feared that the project was going to be incomplete. Therefore, don’t you think teamwork would be more bearable if each student was graded individually?

When I finished high school, I was eager to study in CEGEP, particularly to learn more about the physiology of the human body. Finally, I thought, I am going to truly start studying in my field of interest: biology. I was wrong. When you have three classes of philosophy and four classes of French, where they ask you to write 5,000-word essays and read four to five novels in one session, how can I focus on the courses specific to my program? Removing one philosophy class and two French classes from the general education program would be a step forward to help students deal with the work overload in CEGEP.

If it is impossible to reduce the courseload, here’s another idea: why can’t we extend the duration of studies in CEGEP to three years for everyone? What is the rush? Indeed, a survey made by the Quebec Ministry of Education already shows that “only 31.5 per cent of students enrolled in pre-university programs obtain their diploma within the scheduled two-year period” (Leduc, 2023). Thus, few students will choose to complete their CEGEP in two years at the sacrifice of their well-being based on some myths that universities will refuse their admission because they stretched out their college studies. Three years of study in CEGEP, instead of two, will give us back our taste for learning because we will have more time to consolidate our new knowledge, in addition to more time for ourselves.

So, dear CEGEP, let’s make you lovable!

*The writer is a student at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit in Longueuil, who submitted this opinion piece as part of a class assignment. Nice work, Camille!