<p>When I was in prep school we wrote 3-5 page papers every week and a couple of longer term papers in History - never in English. My kids write papers, but not every single week, and sometimes there is only one longer history research paper. I never wrote anything longer than 12 pages in colleges except my thesis which was over 100. The papers my kids do write in high school are well critiqued, it’s just it takes a while for the teachers to get through them all so they don’t get them assigned as often as we did. </p>
<p>My older son, who is a junior at Carnegie Mellon, is in a major (CS) where he doesn’t write papers. He’s got lots of projects and works much, much harder than he did in high school. But he hasn’t had a problem with the humanities classes he had to take. He’s got a 3.95 GPA, so I think his preparation was adequate. He did get a B on a paper for which the comment was “This would have been a A paper if you had handed it in on time.” Apparently CS projects were more important!</p>
<p>Neither of my kids plan to take any more English classes beyond what their colleges force them to take, but younger son will likely be in a writing intensive major. *History or International Relations.)</p>
<p>I did see public school friends of mine back in the day who had no idea how to write a college paper. They had a very hard time. I don’t think my kids are in the same boat. Personally, I thought college was easier than high school because the most papers I ever had in a course in a semester was three short ones, and most were just one long paper. My kids have very good class discussions at least from the reports I hear about them.</p>