In grad school, I’ve encountered comparisons with the amount of work students are expected to do “these days” as opposed to the amount they were expected to do “back then.” Of course the comparison is always unflattering toward present-day students.
I’ve never complained or felt like complaining about workloads in my courses. However, I do maintain some skepticism toward some profs’ claims that what we’re doing these days is easy, a light load, compared to things as they used to be. I doubt the difference is that significant, and I doubt the significance of the difference.
So I’m wondering if there might be some objective way to compare the amount of reading that students had to do in the past with the amount they have to do now, specifically in the humanities (even more specifically, in Philosophy). I assume that then, as now, “reading” means “being prepared to discuss and/or write about intelligently.”
Anyone know of a lead on such an investigation?
-FrL-
(The background of this is that some students have remarked that a certain professor’s course requires, to put it in so many words, too much reading. The professor has gone on the record in response, saying that the definition of “seminar” includes the notion that students are required to read, in his word, “vast” amounts of significant material and be prepared to discuss it. “Vast” means, in this case, about 200 dense philosophical pages per week, for ten weeks. (A different and entire book each week.) This prof. has said he believes anything which does not have this requirement does not count as a genuine seminar. That brings up a second question–is there any basis in fact for this stricture on the use of the term “seminar?”)
I think it is bullshit. Even if it isn’t complete bullshit, it isn’t all that relevant. Almost every year, students push the academic boundaries to new heights in everything from kindergarten to graduate school. Today’s kids are smarter and better prepared academically than students were in the past (as a whole). The Flynn Effect is made up of a broad range of findings, not only in the U.S., but around the world. IQ scores are rising at about the points per decade and have been for some time. This is a very large effect and doesn’t just impact IQ tests. Everything from the SAT to the GRE to many regular college tests have a high loading on IQ scores.
You don’t have to go back very far until the bright students of yesteryear become average and then, later, well below average compared to today’s students. If students really did have to work very hard back in the day, a perfectly reasonable hypothesis is that most students didn’t have the raw brain horsepower to learn what they are being taught as quickly as they do today. Look at science books from say, the 1950’s compared to a new one today. Students have to learn almost of of what they learned plus many orders of magnitude beyond that and most do fine.
This whole line of thought doesn’t mesh with reality at all. The opposite is true if you infer what the implications are supposed to be.
My husband is a grad student. Most of his seminars are about a book a week. I think that’s pretty standard. I suspect program to program varies more than twenty-five years ago vs. today.
Students at various levels have sometimes been told that they should expect to spend X hours out of class on reading/studying/homework for every one hour spent in the classroom. I don’t remember what values I’ve heard for X, and under what conditions, but if you were to look for official appearances of this rule of thumb in various contexts through the years, it might give you something like what you’re looking for.
Anecdotally, I hear professors complain all the time that reading loads have fallen dramatically.
All I can offer is my second semester senior year (1972). I took a political science seminar that required reading three nonfiction books for each week’s discussion on a particular aspect of society. I took a course in mystery fiction that also called for reading three mystery books a week. I took a history course that had a more normal load of about nine books. There were two other courses as well.
This was notable only in that the mystery course was unusual. The political science seminar was given to majors every year. The course loads in the other classes were normal as well.
I don’t think there is the slightest question that course reading has shrunk over time. One thing to remember is that today half, perhaps more, of the high school graduates in this country go to college. That’s ten times the percentage of those who went right after WWII, when fewer than half the population even graduated high school. You would naturally expect that the 50th percentile of students would on average read less and be able to do less than the 90th percentile of students. If course loads *hadn’t * changed, then and only then would you expect to find an anomaly.
This pertains only to undergraduate work. I can’t speak to how graduate work has changed.
Anecdotal evidence again, and this doesn’t apply to university, but school. When I was an A-level student (in about 1998) I was looking through some old exam papers from the late 70s and early 80s. Those papers were significantly tougher (at least in maths and physics) than the more recent ones. There was more content, and at a higher level of complexity. I was actaully quite glad I wasn’t taking those exams, since I wouldn’t then have got the grades that I did.
At the undergrad and postgrad levels, I haven’t noticed this so much, but then again, I didn’t really go looking in this manner.
When teaching a class for the first time, I go back to the syllabus that I was given when I took the comparable course. Invariably, I look at the reading requirements and think “I can’t get away with that; my students would never do it.” Often, even the scaled-back reading list that I do give them elicits complaints of there being too much reading.