<p>having to read AND digest 500-800 pages in a single week for a single class?
yeah right</p>
<p>College is first and foremost a business. Whatever they can do to lure the wallets of gullible young students is what they will trend towards. Any establishment of Higher Education will have the main priority to first make money, second comes delivering education.</p>
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<p>I think for first-years, it’s much more important to go for depth over breadth, if only to allow the students to get used to actually analyzing what’s going on in the text. The professor who assigned the 75-100 pages of reading a week was excellent at encouraging us to dig deeper beyond what was written. Great discussion leader. The ironic thing is that though he assigned a relatively light load of reading, he was known (and is still known, I suppose) as the hardest grader in the Humanities department. A great experience, nevertheless!</p>
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<p>Ahahaha. I do enjoy the bragging rights! 
75-125 pages per class for first-years is probably closer to the norm, I’d say. I took HUM and SOSC at the same time, so 125-250 pages of reading a week. (It hit 450+ pages a week during spring quarter, courtesy of that one class …) I will say that it was kind of hellish for me, though, especially in the spring. While I don’t mind reading and enjoy it in most cases, I’m extraordinarily slow at it. I’ve since learned how to skim. ;)</p>
<p>(Currently, I’m running on around 50-60 pages of reading a week now. Extraordinarily light, and I’m relishing the break, I have to say, though most of it’s been extremely dull so far. But it’s balanced out by two languages and a math class, so a fair trade.)</p>
<p>One of the history majors I’m acquainted with has said that she gets assigned 200+ page readings per class. She was taking two history classes at the time, so she did hit 800 pages of reading a week, for what it’s worth. I have no idea what the quality of her discussions were, though.</p>
<p>neltharion: That reminds of last semester when I saw my former roommate struggling/constantly reading/studying in the library. He is a transfer from Northwestern and tried to start Emory off by “boosting” his GPA(he actually ended up getting about the same as he did at NU) so took “easier” polisci courses that year, while I was struggling my a** off in all of my upperlevel science courses and history/religion/polisci courses. When I saw him last semester, and he described his workload, all I had to say was: “It had to kick in some time, now you know how it feels”. </p>
<p>By the way if one is a history or polisci major (especially at a top school, even here) in really intensive courses for those majors. 500-800 between all of them is completely possible. I stand by how I had 400+ pages a week for Arab-Israeli Conflict. Constantly reading books and these primary documents (legislation, treaties, etc.) where we had to read really closely to probe the language to get a hint of how serious the parties involved were about certain clauses. So it was a breadth and depth combo. That class was an awesome beast. Still, in general, most social science/humanities courses I’ve taken exceed 100pgs a week,though 400 isn’t normal.</p>
<p>Basically, while it may be uncommon for most students, it is most certainly possible. Some of these profs. aren’t playing around. As for freshmen, there were quite a few in Arab-Israeli Conflict (which was 300-level), they seemed quite intuitive and adjusted well. Perhaps they were energized b/c it is one of the most popular social science courses here that isn’t a major requirement (or period). Dr. Stein is awesome (was on CNN today speaking on the Egyptian uprisings)!</p>
<p><a href=“1”>quote</a> there is a negative correlation between learning and participation in Greek life; (2) the gap in learning between African-Americans and Caucasions widens rather than shrinks in college; (3) students who study alone rather than in group study learn more; (4) college students studied about the same amount of hours between 1925 and 1960, but since 1960 the hours students put into their studies has declined while recreational activity on campus has grown.
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<p>And none of these are surprising to me at all.</p>
<p>That’s interesting, but like other posters have stated, I wonder whether the students were talking about what is assigned or what they actually read. In my freshman seminar philosophy/cognitive science course (one of the most interesting courses I’ve ever taken, by the way), we had anywhere between 30-60 pages of reading due every Monday, Wednesday, or Friday (approx. 100-150 pages per week), but there were definitely days where I only had the time to skim the readings. In Bio, we always had about 20-30 pages of reading - also due every Monday/Wednesday/Friday (so around 60-90 paged a week of the textbook) - but I mostly skimmed them if I didn’t understand the lectures. Generally, though, most of the humanities courses have at least 100+ pages a week of reading, and very often more. Not everyone will do the reading, but I’m surprised if so many students aren’t even assigned it in the first place.</p>
<p>Does anyone else find it strange that students in 1960 studied for 40 hours a week? I wonder if that includes class time. For some reason I just find it hard to believe that the AVERAGE student, at any point in time, studied for 6 hours a day.</p>
<p>jeandevaches, I don’t find that hard to believe at all. There were less electronics and distractions, and only the truly qualified and hardworking students attended college. This would bring up the average studying time up, a lot.</p>
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<p>One factor is that more than twice as many students have jobs now, and more than three times as many are working over 20 hours a week. Another issue is that some types of studying and homework just don’t take as long as they used to; the internet and electronic databases can cut research time by a huge amount. It’s also possible that they had a broader idea of what constituted “studying;” does reading a newspaper count? Or they may have felt a greater pressure to exaggerate back then, though of course you can see in this very thread that some people still feel compelled to greatly overstate how much they study.</p>
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<p>If by “truly qualified” you mean “rich and white”. Though it’s certainly true that college is seen as much more of a necessity now for even low-level white-collar jobs, while there aren’t as many blue-collars jobs available, leading a lot of people to go to college when they really don’t need or want to.</p>
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We do just fine with our ridiculous reading load. Our professor is great at directing the flow of conversation and the students in my conference are very intuitive and well adjusted.</p>
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<p>You have classes that require 800 pages a week?</p>
<p>Not quite, but my intro humanities course requires roughly 300-350 pages of primary sources per week, plus secondary sources. Elevating the difficulty of the courses as one progresses in college, 500-800 pages per week isn’t that insane.</p>
<p>Except, as far as I’ve seen, there are literally no classes that require that much.</p>
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<p>I once read in a university catalog that 1 credit unit was supposed to correspond to a workload of 3 hours per week (including class time, lab time, studying, etc.). So taking 15 credit units of courses (what was considered a normal full time course schedule) meant a theoretical workload of 45 hours per week.</p>
<p>Of course, actual workload may be significantly different. In practice, only the courses known to be heavy workload (i.e. those with labs, computer programming, or large term projects) approximated the 3 hours per week per unit workload. Others tended to be significantly lighter in workload.</p>
<p>Another variable in how much work a course is can be one’s reading speed. According to [this</a> web site](<a href=“http://www.reachoutmichigan.org/learn/suggest.html]this”>Improving Reading Speed):</p>
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<p>Obviously, a 600 word per minute reader will take only half the time a 300 word per minute reader will take on a voluminous reading assignment. The former many think, “this course is easy; all you have to do is read the books”, while the latter may think, “this course is too much work; it takes forever to do all the reading”.</p>
<p>This entire thread seems to be totally ignorant of the fact that certain subjects just aren’t “read”. Computer science is mostly programming and lecture. Chemistry is still largely demonstrated through labs. There’s never been reading in math. Humanities courses are not the only things things schools offer (thank goodness; I couldn’t care less about half the BS english majors “study”). Also, lots of reading does not equate to quality education at all. I know plenty of people (some are professors) who’ve read Socrates, Adam Smith, Ayn Rand and every other “visionary” and they’re no more brilliant ET’s index finger. Good teaching requires a teacher, not some guy who walks in and says “chapters 4-7 by next week - now get the hell out”. On top of that, all this talk is grossly discriminatory to those with ADHD.</p>
<p>It is all relevant.</p>
<p>I definitely read upwards of 200+ per week and wrote about 35+ pages last semester. And that’s just my first year.</p>
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<p>Last I checked, math courses had books and papers to read. Of course, reading one page of advanced math may take as much time as reading dozens of pages of humanities or social studies (that’s why VT’s CCC specifies “non-technical materials” when discussing reading speed above).</p>
<p>Hey Biokinetica, just fyi, Socrates didn’t write anything.</p>
<p>JanofLeiden, from what I understand, Socrates said things and Plato wrote them. At least that’s what I remember being told. Someone saying they read Socrates likely means they read things that Plato wrote which come from Socrates.</p>
<p>The problem of Socrates is actually a big debate in philosophy that there’s no point in going into here. Suffice to say it’s not as simple as “Socrates said things and Plato wrote them.”</p>