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# Reading for courses, how much and how fast?
- URL: https://thepatrologist.com/reading-for-courses-how-much-and-how-fast/
- Published: 2017-07-17T10:12:31.000Z
- Updated: 2017-07-17T10:12:31.000Z
- Author: Seumas Macdonald
- Tags: Uncategorized, #Migrated-1784156034836, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-07-15 22:54

Recently I’ve been trying to figure out some guidelines for setting readings for university courses.

There seem to be a number of complicating factors:

- Do students read?
- How much time can you expect students to read each week?
- How fast can students read?
- How dense is the reading material?
- What level of engagement are they expected to have in the reading?

On question 1, I think this is similar to the question about lecture-attendance. These days, for some types of courses anyway, students simply do not turn up to lectures. They know that the content is fixed, that the lecture is a delivery system for that content, and that it will be recorded. They’d much rather listen to the recording at 1.5 – 2x speed and write down notes from that, than turn up and be bored by a droning robot. Attempts to circumvent this by essentially using ‘content protection’ rackets – not recording lectures, not doing handouts, trying to force students to turn up, are all pointless because they are attempts to salvage a stupid method of content delivery.

Anyway, that’s my tangent about lectures. While there may be good *strategies* for getting students to do readings, those shouldn’t amount to *tricks and manipulation*. In the end, if a student doesn’t *want* to do the readings, they are probably taking the wrong class.

Question 2 is generally fixed at a higher level than the subject level. The ol’ Carnegie Unit expectation is 2 hrs out of class for every 1hr in class. But that’s probably not going to be 2 hrs of reading. It is meant to encapsulate *all* the class’s external demands. It also depends upon how much set reading dovetails with assignment and assessment demands across the subject.

Assuming you have a class that fits the standard ¼ of a full-time work load, and has 2-3 hr of class per week, anywhere between 3 and 6hrs of reading could be reasonable.

Questions 3-5 are interrelated. The most useful site I [found was this one her](http://cte.rice.edu/blogarchive/2016/07/11/workload?ref=thepatrologist.com)e, which contains not only a discussion of the question of reading and workload, but a calculator built off self-reported data, that allows you to input Pages per week, Page Density (for different types of texts), Difficulty of Text, and Purpose of Reading (Survey/Understand/Engage) to produce estimated pages/hour.

From this, my rules of thumb going forward are 10 pages/hr estimate for texts to be discussed/engaged, 15 pages/hr for texts to be learnt/absorbed. On this proviso, a textbook chapter + a relatively short primary doc a week is more than feasible for an undergrad subject; a longer section of a scholarly secondary text could substitute for both.