Professor’s '25k pages/week' post
A seminar professor’s post claiming a '25,000 pages per week' reading load sparked debate and pulled about 5,000 likes on X. (x.com) Replies clustered around feasibility, reading speed, and what a heavy reading regimen actually looks like in practice. (x.com)
A professor’s post saying a seminar required 25,000 pages of reading in one week touched off a dispute over whether the number was literal, cumulative, or impossible. (x.com) The post, published on X, drew roughly 5,000 likes and a long reply chain. A separate response from Ravi, who writes about books online as Reads With Ravi, broke the claim into pages-per-day math and asked what kind of reading could fit that pace. (x.com 1) (x.com 2) If the figure were taken at face value, 25,000 pages in seven days works out to about 3,571 pages a day, or about 149 pages an hour if someone read nonstop for all 168 hours in a week. That is the arithmetic critics kept returning to in the replies. (openai.com) (x.com) Research on reading speed gives the debate its frame. A 2019 meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert estimated average silent reading speed for English non-fiction at 238 words per minute, and a 2016 review by Keith Rayner and colleagues said claims of very high-speed reading with strong comprehension do not fit the evidence. (sciencedirect.com) (psychologicalscience.org) Universities that publish workload guidance usually assume much smaller weekly reading loads. Rice University’s course workload estimator says skilled adult readers working for comprehension are around 300 words per minute in a normal reading environment, and Wake Forest’s estimator asks faculty to model page counts, page density, and difficulty rather than assign by instinct. (rice.edu) (wfu.edu) Those tools also treat “a page” as a shaky unit. Wake Forest’s estimator lets instructors change words per page and reading purpose, which means 100 pages of dense theory, 100 pages of legal text, and 100 pages of a lightly formatted handout are not equivalent workloads. (wfu.edu) That gap helped split the reactions. Some readers treated the post as evidence of academic excess, while others said seminar reading lists often include optional items, skimming targets, archival material, or repeated references that inflate raw page counts without implying cover-to-cover reading. (x.com 1) (x.com 2) At the average non-fiction rate Brysbaert reported, even a lower-density estimate of 250 words a page would put 25,000 pages at about 438 hours of reading. At 300 words a page, the total rises to about 525 hours, far beyond the 168 hours available in a week. (sciencedirect.com) (openai.com) The fight online was less about one syllabus than about what counts as “reading” in graduate school: full comprehension, strategic skimming, selective extraction, or simply being able to discuss the material in seminar. The post lasted because the number was concrete enough to check and big enough to make people do the math. (rice.edu) (x.com)
