So, I’m still currently in high school in my senior year. I happen to be taking a lot of APs and I’m just wondering, in college, do they make you write essays for an exam? For example you have 40 minutes to write a compare and contrast essay or a thesis essay etc. They seem very unnatural to me and I definitely don’t understand their purpose as I would rather have more time to fully compile all my thoughts and write a decent essay. (I know that you have to write essays for courses but those are ‘papers’ that are due on a certain date. They aren’t done in class with a specific time constraint.)
In college, for certain upper division (or even lower division) social science and humanities courses, essay questions do in fact appear on exams (or the exam may be just an in class essay.) Granted, they usually appear on midterm of final exams where you’re allotted more time but there’s still an expectation to be able to produce coherent, effective essays under time constraints. I took an intro level American Studies course last semester and the midterm was an essay question where we had to synthesize a certain number of topics/themes into a single argument in 1.5 hours.
My English major friends seem to experience this more than other majors.
Thank you so much for your input. I’m studying biomedical engineering so based on your response I can sort of assume that there may not be as many essays in class with time constraints as with other majors such as English or History.
While you may be majoring in biomedical engineering, many schools have general education requirements, where you will be required to take humanities courses with mainly essay questions on exams.
Also, while you may not have to write entire essays in class, biology or other science classes may still have free response questions, where you will be expected to solve a problem and explain your solution under time pressure. You won’t always have all the time to compose your thoughts. Learning to write well (and to write well under time constraints) is a valuable skill to have.
I’m a civil engineering major, so hopefully my experience is helpful.
I’ve taken 2 gened classes thus far. Neither of them have had in-class essay examinations. 1 was a seminar-style class so it was entirely discussion based. The other is a history class, and all our exams have been take home essays. We generally get about a week to work on them.
As an engineering major I only have to take 8 gen ed courses - which is about the norm for an ABET accredited program. So, if you want to avoid classes with in class essays, it shouldn’t be too hard. Just use rate my professor and upperclassmen who have taken the classes you are thinking about to see if there are in class essays.
But just remember that while you CAN avoid those classes, there are trade offs. The expectations for a take home paper are going to be much higher than the expectations for an in class essay, so you’ll likely spend a lot more time writing, for example.
One of my majors is computer science. My data structures class required essays where we evaluated the situation he gave us and decided what data structures/graph algorithms to use for it, and had to justify our reasoning in detail. This was in addition to the typical CS problems that came before these essay questions in the exam. We had one essay on each of the midterms, and had three on the final. We also had essays during the quarter where we had to evaluate the different data structures we were given under specific circumstances (one at 3-4 pages plus data tables, the other at 6-7 pages plus data tables). That’s the highest amount of writing I’ve had to do in a class so far, and it didn’t even count as a writing intensive class for GE requirements.
On the other hand, I took a religious studies class my freshman year with practically no writing. There was one “essay” on each of the three exams, we were only required to write two paragraphs minimum for each of them, and on one of the exams the “essay” was even optional. Yet this was counted as a writing intensive class.
And just to offer a third perspective of a social science class, I took a syntax theory class for my linguistics major last quarter. Our midterm required two essays plus some data analysis. Our final required three essays plus some data analysis. Again, this didn’t count as a writing intensive class but still had a fair amount of writing.
My point is that not all science classes have little/no writing in them. Likewise, not all humanities classes have a ton of writing. It really depends on the specific class and your professor, but yes you can have essay exams in just about any field if the professor feels like writing such an exam. As a general rule, humanities classes will have the most writing, followed by social science, and science classes generally have the least amount of writing. There are exceptions though (see examples above). For what it’s worth I don’t recall having to do extensive writing for any of my other CS requirements thus far, and I’m finishing up my upper div core requirements right now.
In college, I’ve discovered that an “essay” is a very loose term that is defined differently based on the instructor. It can be anywhere from your standard 5-6 paragraph essay with introduction, body, and conclusion, to a single 3-5 sentence paragraph. For in class essays, some college professors tend to be a lot more lenient than high school teachers on the amount of content and like to focus more on the quality of the content.
The most difficult in-class essay assignments I’ve ever done in college were for one of the classes I took last semester. In my major, seniors are required to take this class, which is graded only upon in-class essays. At the end of every week we had to create a position paper about some articles on a particular contemporary issue or hot topic. The paper not only had to be logical, well supported with evidence, and be within the required format, but it also had to be completed within the class time limit and a minimum of two pages.
I haven’t written an essay for an exam… most of my exams are just scantrons.