How many pages do you read in college

In a science class like an intro bio course.........you aren't going to be assinged reading (at least I wasnt). You read if you choose to. No one is gonna check up on you. You can supplement your lecture notes by reading the same topics in the book, but by no means is it required.

The classes where you are going to get ASSIGNED readings are the humanities. Sociology, religious studies, english, history, psychology, etc etc. Professors will often tell you to read X chapter from the book they asked you to buy. Or, a lot of professors from my school use moodle or some other webiste (blackboard) to post course readings that you can print off. The number of pages varies from class to class and from week to week. I've had as little as 15 pages of reading and the next class period he expects us to read 75.....so i dunno, its really hard to say. SOME TEACHERS ARE CRAZY. They run their class like the only course you have is theirs, and theyll honestly assign like 300 pages for the week. First of all....NO ONE is going to have time to read it. Second of all, they aren't going to have time to cover it in class! Its really like an art, youve gotta find out whats important, and youll get the feel as you read. Another thing professors will do is when you have a syllabus, itll have all the days and what readings are for what days...sometimes youll just see a date that has Book X that is to be discussed in class....that means that that book should be read by that date and its really up to you to spread it out over time.

But again, if you are taking science courses liek chemistry, ochem, biology, physics.........you dont get assigned reading. You read the chapters if it helps you do well in the course. And youll find that in some classes the books are useless because the prof just takes everything from the lecture. These are all things youll pick up as you go.

 

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Most have recommended reading. About a chapter a week (maybe about 50 pages?). This is for science classes. It might be more like 100 pages a week or more for nonscience.

 

some chapters in bio courses, like cell physio, can be closer to 100 pages, and may only be covered in one lecture, which means you're reading 100-200 pages a week or more for one course. Usually not required, and in many classes you can get away with not getting the book at all, but it is usually very helpful in supplementing the lecture.

 

I honestly barely read anything in undergrad. Most of my proffs would test from their lectures not the assigned readings which I learned the hard way first semester. I would take really good notes in class, convert them into flash cards and then go thru them before a test and rock stuff out. If you have practice problems for math/science classes then of course those need to get done too. The only classes I ever read for were humanities and that was only enough to be able to write essays if necessary. I got great grades in a few English lit classes having only read 2 or 3 of the assigned books.

 

Hah, 10 pages per day? That would be low-balling it. Of course, I never read for biology every single day, but I would say for a given week, upwards of about 150 pages a week were supposed to be read in our introductory biology courses. Biology is very concept and memorization-heavy. For other science courses, there wasn't as much reading to be done. Even in some of the other nonscience courses, there was less reading involved.

 

For the general chemistry series... 90-120 pages/week

For general biology... 50 pages/week

For molecular biology... 150-200 pages/week

 

If I take notes out of the book they usually aren't very detailed. Most of the time its just some odd fact that I want to make sure I remember. Or I might make a table of something like hormones, and their function just to have it all in one spot.

A good portion of my classes I get away with just reading over powerpoint slides, and sometimes assigned book sections that we're skipping in class.

 

Number of pages assigned
------------------------- = # of pages
Number of beers in fridge

 

I never take notes from my readings. I usually just read the material along with the scheduled lecture and then re-read it all before the test. It works very well for me. Just make sure you are "in the moment" when you are reading. Don't read 10 pages and then realize you were thinking about something else. That sucks!

 

This may seem like common sense, but you'll be amazed how much faster you read material when you aren't screwin around on SDN or some other website. Seriously...something that would have taken me 3 hours takes me like 1 if i'm not doing other things. And you wont notice that you are doing. You are in the library, you probably have your lap top, internect connection......you read 5 pages...oh lets check SDN (20 minutes go by)......read maybe 10 pages.... (hm i wonder if that person responded to my post)......DONT LET IT TRAP YOU!

Moral of the story: When its time to study.....STUDY. Its taken me 3 1/2 years to learn that, i woulda saved so much time if i had done it since freshman year.

 

each person's study techniques will vary.. so follow whatever works for you not what someone else says.

that said, I did basically nothing in undergrad until the night before exams. Then I would study all the high-yield stuff from the notes and maybe do some problems from the book to understand concepts. I never read anything from the textbook (although I did look at the pictures...) I crammed for all those classes; g. bio, g. chem, micro, bio-chem, o-chem, physics... looking back if I wasn't working/chilling all the time maybe I would've had time to study every day and would've retained more info (probably not though). it worked and learning how to stuff ridiculous amounts of info into your head in a short time is great practice for med school.

again, it depends totally on you. the key is being keenly aware of how much you need to know for the exams and how long it will take for you to learn it. People get into trouble when they lose track of this "inner sense of urgency", same as in high-school, college, med school, etc.

 

I honestly haven't taken notes since freshmen year, powerpoints usually cover everything I need to know.

 

In my intro Bio class reading was optional, I generally only read when the professor recommended it or when I was unsure about the topic after reviewing the lecture notes. Reading is college is easy because generally you're not bogged down by busy work, it hardly takes up any time. For my chemistry class the professor never told us what we could read, and his lectures didn't coherently follow the organization of the book so reading was almost useless. Read if you don't understand or the professor pushes it on you, but most of the time the lecture notes are more than enough.

 

Depends on what school and depends on how easy their program is. It also depends on whether you go to a school with quarters or semesters. My reading was usually at least 30 pages a night per science class and around 40-50 for an english/history class. However, professors won't make you read but they usually suggest you read to help solidify concepts and give you more background information. If your professors' are nice enough to spoon feed you all your info in power points, then you don't have to read anything but that's no fun.

 

So far I have found that the average class that requires reading (or is strongly recommended) is about 100 textbook pages per exam. If you assume 4 exams for a semester and 3 classes a semester with reading (foreign language, chemistry, physics, math, pe, and some others just won't, or might not test on them), that's 12 reading required tests a semester. At 100 pages each that's 1200 pages. 15 weeks in a semester and that averages out to about 80 textbook pages a week. Of course, this is all generalized and if you are a procrastinator like me there are weeks with no reading and weeks with a couple hundred pages.

 

We usually covered about two chapters a week (one per lecture) in our intro bio classes. I always at least skimmed through the chapters, if not read them entirely, before the lecture. So for biology, it was probably about 40-50 pages a week. Chemistry was less reading (maybe 20 pgs/week?) and more practice problems (again, not usually collected, but immensely helpful). Just my experience. I would imagine it varies greatly given a particular university or professor.

 

It honestly depends on the class and the school. Classes like general biology and general chemistry I never read the textbook. When I took human embryology, biochemistry, genetics, pathology, immunology, nutrition, and pharmacology, the only way to pass the classes was to read the book. In a typical week I when I took the advance science courses I would have read less than 50 pages a week.

The classes that did require a decent amount of reading was history and English (advance English classes).

The amount of material you need to read in undergraduate school isn't the challenge. The challenge, for the entry level science courses, is knowing how to solve problems on the exams. Doing good with the problems is more a matter of having to practice the problems than reading the book. The advance courses require more reading and a deeper understanding of the material.