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’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.