I mean, there’s 650 word assignments and 650 word assignments. This one sounds like a joke but I’ve had assignments in science units that were around 600 words that needed to be fully referenced and to both adequately describe and comment on a complex topic, where the word count was explicitly set very, very low for the amount of evidence we were expected to provide, by a practitioner who was frankly very proud of the high level of difficulty of the unit, which was a capstone environmental science unit. He was constantly talking about how many people had to repeat the unit, “because they didn’t actually complete the assignment”, because it’s honestly hard to know if you’ve gotten enough done to answer the prompt in so few words! I did pretty well in the unit overall - one of my weakest but still I believe I got a distinction - and I was sweating bullets worrying about whether or not I had adequately responded to the assignment question. Those assignments weren’t especially time consuming perhaps but they were difficult.
I’ll also say, I don’t know if you’ve had to write a (scientific) lit review or other assignment for a science unit where you’re providing 3-4 references per paragraph, which you should understand and paraphrase to support whatever you’re trying to say, but bumping out the 2,000 words was always by far the easiest part of that process - a week and a half of reading journal articles and taking notes followed by a few hours of typing.
I’ve never written a college-level essay for a STEM class. I would probably have failed any non-intro level STEM class.
But speaking from a humanities perpspective, when you got a 650 word assignment it was almost always because the prof/TAs were handing out freebies to lighten their own workloads. As in, only way you fail them is by not turning anything in. Or at least that’s what I thought until now.
Definitely in a lit class, there is no way you are ever going to be submitting a 650 word essay. The only time I’ve had to do references packed that dense was in a Chinese history class and that was mostly because the prof had a hard-on for his own books.
If you did that in a lit class you it would actually drastically increase your chances of failing. It was viewed as just remixing other peoples’ work instead of writing anything of your own. The only exceptions were a class I took on translating literature, and classes on writing theory. And even then, 3-4 references per paragraph would be viewed as excessive.
Yeah, that makes sense. In science at least, you aren’t doing anything new in undergrad. Anything you say has to come straight out of someone else’s work, because you aren’t actually doing any! If I, as an undergrad, say something about genetics that I haven’t gotten from someone else’s paper, what reason do I have for thinking it’s true? I haven’t done any genetics research so it’s effectively a guess. You are still expected to apply the knowledge you get from your sources to the topic at hand, but you just aren’t in a position to say anything too novel. It’s one of the reasons I suspect STEM degrees are probably on average easier than arts degrees tbh.
That can be said about every undergraduate degree tbh lol…it’s a matter of demonstrating you learned the material. Humanities professors have already read your essays before you wrote them a decade ago.
Part of it is training you to do actual research that will be new once you go into grad school or become a professional in your field. You can’t go from writing 1,000 word essays to writing a 75,000 word thesis overnight.
I mean, there’s 650 word assignments and 650 word assignments. This one sounds like a joke but I’ve had assignments in science units that were around 600 words that needed to be fully referenced and to both adequately describe and comment on a complex topic, where the word count was explicitly set very, very low for the amount of evidence we were expected to provide, by a practitioner who was frankly very proud of the high level of difficulty of the unit, which was a capstone environmental science unit. He was constantly talking about how many people had to repeat the unit, “because they didn’t actually complete the assignment”, because it’s honestly hard to know if you’ve gotten enough done to answer the prompt in so few words! I did pretty well in the unit overall - one of my weakest but still I believe I got a distinction - and I was sweating bullets worrying about whether or not I had adequately responded to the assignment question. Those assignments weren’t especially time consuming perhaps but they were difficult.
I’ll also say, I don’t know if you’ve had to write a (scientific) lit review or other assignment for a science unit where you’re providing 3-4 references per paragraph, which you should understand and paraphrase to support whatever you’re trying to say, but bumping out the 2,000 words was always by far the easiest part of that process - a week and a half of reading journal articles and taking notes followed by a few hours of typing.
I’ve never written a college-level essay for a STEM class. I would probably have failed any non-intro level STEM class.
But speaking from a humanities perpspective, when you got a 650 word assignment it was almost always because the prof/TAs were handing out freebies to lighten their own workloads. As in, only way you fail them is by not turning anything in. Or at least that’s what I thought until now.
Definitely in a lit class, there is no way you are ever going to be submitting a 650 word essay. The only time I’ve had to do references packed that dense was in a Chinese history class and that was mostly because the prof had a hard-on for his own books.
If you did that in a lit class you it would actually drastically increase your chances of failing. It was viewed as just remixing other peoples’ work instead of writing anything of your own. The only exceptions were a class I took on translating literature, and classes on writing theory. And even then, 3-4 references per paragraph would be viewed as excessive.
Yeah, that makes sense. In science at least, you aren’t doing anything new in undergrad. Anything you say has to come straight out of someone else’s work, because you aren’t actually doing any! If I, as an undergrad, say something about genetics that I haven’t gotten from someone else’s paper, what reason do I have for thinking it’s true? I haven’t done any genetics research so it’s effectively a guess. You are still expected to apply the knowledge you get from your sources to the topic at hand, but you just aren’t in a position to say anything too novel. It’s one of the reasons I suspect STEM degrees are probably on average easier than arts degrees tbh.
That can be said about every undergraduate degree tbh lol…it’s a matter of demonstrating you learned the material. Humanities professors have already read your essays before you wrote them a decade ago.
Part of it is training you to do actual research that will be new once you go into grad school or become a professional in your field. You can’t go from writing 1,000 word essays to writing a 75,000 word thesis overnight.