[superhuzza]

Perhaps the expectations on students are a bit unreasonable?

"Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next."

Reading Crime and Punishment alone is estimated to take about 11-12 hours at 300WPM. Then consider your average student is taking 4 or 5 classes per semester? If they all assigned that much reading, that would be 60 hours a week of just reading, not even including time to process what's being read, or write assignments, revise etc.

[datadrivenangel]

It was common to get at least a book's worth of reading a week for the humanities oriented classes at my undergrad. Always fun seeing the freshman morale sink a few weeks in when they realized they had to either skim aggressively or do ~10-20 hours of reading.

Of course, those suckers got to avoid the hard science lab time, so good for them.

[superhuzza]

Certainly not a sustainable amount if every class is giving a similar workload.

Crime and Punishment alone is over 500 pages.

With 5 classes assigning a book each, that's 2500 pages a week, or 357 pages every single day.

I certainly did not read that much during my undergrad nor my master's degree.

[7402]

Rule of thumb for my college classes was 3 hours of outside work for every hour in class. So 3 hours of lecture per week = 9 hours of problem sets, reading, etc. That was 50 years ago.

[quacked]

Were those classes actually reading all of Pride and Prejudice in a single week, or were they skimming and then using prior skill and knowledge to conduct discussions on the book?