<p>...assign so much reading that is impossible to read in a semester's time?! </p>
<p>Background: I'm a CS major that never really needed to read for class. Anyway, I never really got my breadth out of the way, so now I am taking all these humanities classes and ***! </p>
<p>Books books books books. It's ridiculous. Do professors really expect you to read every little word? Am I missing something? Tips? Suggestions?</p>
<p>My secret: you don’t read but still get good grades by going to lecture. I would lightly skim the material before attending lecture. Although, if you still feel you need the readings, just do about half and make good judgment in determining what’s actually relevant (on the midterm) material.</p>
<p>I never went to any lecture or discussion for any of my humanities classes. I found reading to be only mildly relevant to essays, so I dedicated 12 contiguous hours (ie. if the essay is due at 12:00PM, I’d start at midnight) to do research online and selectively choose readings + write. To prepare for midterms, I’d look at the lectures to figure out what the prof. thought was important, and browsed readings for jargon. This let me focus on my CS courses for the most part, and I did just fine in all my humanities courses.</p>
<p>It depends on the professor, but usually they don’t expect you to read everything. They expect you to skim to get the main idea.</p>
<p>Welcome to a Rhetoric major’s world.</p>
<p>I went to a speed-reading seminar last night…And the girl said we are receiving up to 5 times as much reading as our parents did at college…so maybe they got that 3.8 but it was easier? lmao I dunno.
Anywhoo…try speed reading! It works 
It’s hard at first…but it seems like a good idea.</p>
<p>@Jeremybeach can you give me a link? Seems like anything I find on google is spam…</p>
<p>Here’s two ways to do speed reading: read tons of things and actually understand them as you read (and then try to read each sentence quicker and see if you actually understand it) or do speed reading assignments which can get fairly repetitive. </p>
<p>Or you can just you know. Not do it. lol I did fine on my humanities courses without reading a majority of the articles. An english class you might want to read the required books, but others…eh.</p>
<p>tell me about it. i have like five readers for my PH upper div elecs, and each reader is like 2 inches thick i kid you not.</p>
<p>Focus on the thesis and the conclusion for the main argument… then skim 1st and last sentence in each paragraph for case studies, sub-points, etc. It worked for me. I was a history major and there is no way you can digest 5-700 pages/wk without learning tricks (or devoting yourself entirely to all the readings).</p>
<p>I shudder to think that any professor would require students to regurgitate that much information. Skim through some of the readings and try to remember some of the main points. You wont even remember 1% of the stuff you’ve read anyway.</p>