It’s been a long, hard day of soccer practice, and all you want to do is go home and sleep, but you can’t. You have to take a shower, do chores, eat dinner and, most importantly (and annoyingly), complete a ton of homework before you can call it a day.

Students who participate in sports, the marching band, drama club, and most other extracurricular activities spend two-to-four hours a day practicing, which forces them to do homework at the end of their long, tiring day. These students often have a hard time getting their homework done and are all too often forced to stay up late to complete their work.

Add to this time crunch a challenging academic course load, and students can be pushed to their limits. Today writer Corey Binns’ article “Homework Overload Gets an ‘F’ from Experts,” quotes Stanford University professor Denise Pope, who studied the effect of homework on high-achieving students. Pope found that “high-achieving students who are swamped with homework can suffer from poor mental and physical health.”

Students participating in extracurricular activities who take challenging classes are more at risk of having poor mental and physical health because they have so much pressure on them to complete school tasks while maintaining a social and personal life.

In her study, Pope – according to Stanford’s Clifton B. Parker – found that “many students struggle to find a balance between homework, extracurricular activities, and social time,” and those students often “felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills.”

Students should be given only homework that will actually be beneficial and have a specific purpose, rather than busy work that does not enhance their learning but does eat up valuable time. Often, students will do homework not to learn, but to get homework points so their grade won’t go down. Students who are short on time view most homework, especially busy work, as “pointless” because it doesn’t help them to learn.

In her research, Pope also questions the importance of assigning too much homework to high- achieving students. “Homework should not be simply assigned as a routine practice,” concluded Pope. “It should be designed to cultivate learning and development.”

Teachers should give less homework to all students because homework can do more harm than good. It seems that teachers don’t take into consideration that students have other classes, a social life, extracurricular activities, and other tasks to keep up with outside of school.

A significant number of students are expected to handle a lot at one time, and it would make their lives easier if less homework were assigned to them.