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I like to teach classes in the afternoon, since I know how late college students go to bed, and I don't go to bed a whole lot earlier myself. Still, let me preach a little sermon here on sleep and stress.
On the sleep front: Shortage of sleep has been blamed for everything from zits to stupidity, and much of the evidence is convincing.
Research by Amy R. Wolson, of the department of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts, documented the relation between sleep habits and grades among students. In a 1997 study of 3,120 high school students, she and her collaborators divided the cases into a group that regularly slept more than eight hours and fifteen minutes a night and a group that regularly slept less than six hours and forty-five minutes. Weekday and weekend sleeping patterns were separately considered. Students who slept less, and students who had greater differences between weekday and weekend sleep, reported being more depressed and sleepier in the daytime, but also tended to have lower grades (C, D, and F).
Subsequent studies have repeatedly found the same thing. Jodi Mindell, a researcher at St. Jospeh's University in Philadelphia in 2007 argued for that people between the ages of 13 and 18 required a minimum of eight and a half to nine and a half hours a night for normal functioning.
Other research is showing that long-term sleep deprivation, over a period of years, can lead to more or less permanent impairment in mental functioning.
On the stress front: In August of 1998, investigators at UCI reported experiments showing that memory in rats is seriously impaired by stress. A stressed-out rat (one with elevated levels of corticosterone secreted in response to an electric shock) is far more likely to get lost in a familiar maze than a mellow one is.
It is not yet clear whether there is a simple relation between stress and memory loss in humans, but that is the expectation. (Rat corticosterone is similar to cortisol, secreted by human adrenal glands in response to danger.) James L. McGaugh, director of the UCI Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory provisionally advised that students should relax before taking tests or doing other things involving memory.
Obvious conclusions: For students, the best advice is probably to convince yourself that your classes are consistently interesting, cool, enjoyable, and so on, and to try to feel as distant as possible from the whole issue of grades and grading. (Grades happen whether you do anything to make them happen or not, so you can in fact ignore them more easily than you think. It is the class that demands attention, not the grade.)
If you can persuade yourself that a class is really interesting, then sleep, stress, and ultimately also grades and the learning that grades are supposed to be proxies for, all will tend to take care of themselves. On the other hand, if you approach classes as crabgrass in the lawn of life, you will like college less, learn less, and (if you still care) have lower grades. So, um, draw your own conclusions!
So why are you sitting up reading this? Go to bed already!