College students might not have an accurate perception of how much they’re drinking.

According to recent studies, when asked to show what they think a standard drink is, students consistently poured more than the advised amounts of alcohol, sometimes as much as four times in excess.

Aaron White, assistant research professor in the department of medical psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., said students tend to underestimate how much they drink because they overestimate how much alcohol is needed in a standard drink.

In his studies, White has shown that past findings regarding college students’ alcohol consumption may be incorrect, or, rather, too low. Even though students are most often honest about how much they drink, they usually think they drank less than they actually did.

“Students tend to think that there should be more ounces of liquor in a shot or mixed drink than there actually should be,” White said. “A lot of it has to do with the fact that we have totally failed to teach students how many ounces of alcohol there should be in a drink.”

Rather than teaching students the basics of alcohol, educators have concentrated too much on actually minimizing the drinking that occurs on college campuses, White said.

“I think it’s a good point that health programs don’t always provide enough information,” said Frederick Gibbons, professor of psychology.

He said he thinks the programs sometimes provide information in a way that confuses the students rather than educates them.

“I think sometimes it has a negative effect that people don’t know all the details,” Gibbons said.

The problem of students not being well educated about their alcoholic consumption is the first point of White’s study; the second is the necessity for labeling of alcoholic beverages.

“I think the beverage industry should be required to label their product, to help minimize the damage that is done,” White said. “You go and you buy grape juice and it’s got serving size information on it. Why shouldn’t a bottle of wine have that type of information on it, too?”

White said he thinks students are also unaware of how much alcohol they consume when purchasing a drink at a bar. Drinks poured at bars tend to contain more than one serving of alcohol.

Likewise, he thinks gender may have something to do with the amount of alcohol put in a drink. Women may often get an even larger amount of alcohol in their drinks, especially from male bartenders, White said.

Mike Adams, manager at Welch Avenue Station, 207 Welch Ave., said most of their bottles have devices on them that measure the alcohol poured. Adams said most bars don’t follow the same guidelines when pouring drinks.

“It measures exactly one ounce every time,” Adams said about the device.

Sometimes, however, bartenders have no choice but to simply pour and count, basically guessing.

Adams said he couldn’t be sure about any tendency for females to receive more alcohol in their drinks.

“I know the tip has a lot to do with that,” he said.

White said he thought the responsibility for knowing how much alcohol is in a drink shouldn’t be put solely on students.

“It’s part of a bartender’s responsibility to monitor how much a person drinks,” he said.

Educators tell students how many drinks define binge drinking, yet fail to explain how much one drink actually is.

“I don’t think that most students set out to drink irresponsibly, I think that sometimes it can happen because you end up drinking more than you think,” said White.