BUZZ
Students in Professor Carlos Noreña’s ancient history classes at University of California, Berkeley used to be expected to read 100 pages per week.
That was two decades ago. In recent years, Noreña has slashed weekly reading assignments — including for his upper level courses — by approximately two thirds, the university’s student newspaper recently reported.
The article featured comments from several humanities professors who admitted to reducing classroom assignments in recent years due to students’ struggles and complaints.
“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,” Noreña told The Daily Californian:
Noreña said while lectures are an important component of class, he assigns primary sources and critical writing to his students because the goal is to push them to read the material and develop their own views. When he first came to UC Berkeley in 2005, he would assign 100 pages per week for an upper division course, with the expectation that students would read 75 to 80 pages.
For the course he plans to teach in the fall, Noreña said he plans to assign about 35 pages per week.
Similarly, American history Professor Mark Brilliant said he used to require students to read seven books for his “History of California and the American West” class. Today, he only assigns excerpts, according to the student newspaper.
“Part of this is to spare students the cost of purchasing books, but part of it is also acquiescing to my sense of — and complaints about — the amount of reading assigned, though those complaints, curiously, haven’t gone away as I’ve shrunk the number of pages assigned,” he said.
Another professor expressed concerns about the growing use of AI and its effects on students’ literacy and critical thinking skills, The Daily Californian reports:
While not all faculty have strictly banned the use of AI in their humanities courses, many of them found its presence to take away from the experience of reading and learning.
[History professor Trevor] Jackson said his students avoid using AI to write, but sometimes ask it to summarize texts while reading.
“I found that very upsetting, because I’ve read the AI summary of my own book, and it’s all wrong,” Jackson said. “Even a good summary is still not grappling with the text.”
However, a few professors said the opposite about their course requirements, including English Professor Grace Lavery. She told the newspaper that her assignments have gotten “slightly heavier” in recent years, and she views students’ struggles with reading long texts as a normal part of learning.
The UC Berkeley article hit on larger concerns about declining academic expectations throughout much of higher education, including at some of America’s most prestigious institutions.
As The College Fix previously reported, even some Ivy League students now struggle to finish an entire book. Meanwhile, professors at other schools have said their students no longer have enough of an attention span to finish an entire movie.
The Fix reported more earlier this month:
Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, literature Professor Tyler Jagt told of an assignment for his rhetoric and writing class that asked students to read a 20-page paper. Not one student finished the paper.
“It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago,” wrote Jagt, who has taught literature and critical writing at Mercer University, James Madison University, and Wake Forest University.
“When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.”
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