Background: First year medical students are burdened with a huge study load in a short span of time. They are under tremendous stress during assessment times and often they go without sufficient sleep during examinations. Objectives: To determine the number of hours of sleep of all study participants on the night before Physiology internal assessment and the marks obtained by them and thus try to find a correlation between the duration of sleep and exam performance. Methods: Study included 146 first year medical students of a private deemed University. The number of hours of sleep obtained by the study participants on the night before the Physiology internal examination was recorded. Then their marks obtained in it exams were tabulated accordingly. Pearson’s correlation was applied to determine if there is a significant correlation between the exam performance and duration of sleep. Results: There was a significant positive correlation between duration of sleep and exam marks obtained showing that lesser the duration of sleep, lesser is the performance in the exams. Conclusion: This study concludes that adequate sleep is essential for optimum performance during exams and deprivation of sleep is an added stress and is detrimental to student performance. Revising the method of assessing the students must be considered as the study reveals the shortcomings of the current pattern.

Keywords: Academic Performance,Cognition, Sleep