But the further in you get, the deeper you go into a topic, the more specialized you are, the harder it gets to condense the vast amount of knowledge you have into a reasonable space. Once you do stuff like a master’s thesis or a PhD thesis, you could just write and write and write and write, there’s so much you could put into that document, because there’s almost endless amounts of depth
Once you start to truly get deep into a subject, you’d be surprised by how quickly the pages fill up when you try to just comprehensively transfer the necessary information onto paper
Page/word limits are ultimately much more difficult than minimums. Taking a concept described in 5000 words and distilling it down to 2500 is much, much harder than writing the 5000 words in the first place. It’s a good test of skill in uni.
Past a point, your instructor/professor only has so much time to read through everyone’s papers, and it’s easy to waffle. If there’s no limit and a student turns in a 500 page write-up when the expectation was 50, that student’s paper will take a lot more time to process through. Enough students do that, and what was supposed to take one week to grade now takes considerably longer, which is a big problem when there’s extra curriculum to go over.
I think the upper limits are mostly there for two reasons. To give the students a rough idea of what’s expected in scope and also to protect the person from having to grade a 100 page thesis when they planned to grade a short essay.
That being said, there were a few times where they enforced strict page limits for us, but in those cases they would warn us about it explicitly multiple times.
I’ve never heard of a page limit. Surely word limit is the standard?
I thought word minimum was the standard.
Sure, in high school or maybe early college
But the further in you get, the deeper you go into a topic, the more specialized you are, the harder it gets to condense the vast amount of knowledge you have into a reasonable space. Once you do stuff like a master’s thesis or a PhD thesis, you could just write and write and write and write, there’s so much you could put into that document, because there’s almost endless amounts of depth
Once you start to truly get deep into a subject, you’d be surprised by how quickly the pages fill up when you try to just comprehensively transfer the necessary information onto paper
Page/word limits are ultimately much more difficult than minimums. Taking a concept described in 5000 words and distilling it down to 2500 is much, much harder than writing the 5000 words in the first place. It’s a good test of skill in uni.
Agreed, concision is perhaps one of the most useful skills I learned that I’m absolutely rubbish at applying.
Circoncision
Past a point, your instructor/professor only has so much time to read through everyone’s papers, and it’s easy to waffle. If there’s no limit and a student turns in a 500 page write-up when the expectation was 50, that student’s paper will take a lot more time to process through. Enough students do that, and what was supposed to take one week to grade now takes considerably longer, which is a big problem when there’s extra curriculum to go over.
In college most of my courses were page ranges. 7-12 pages, 75-100, etc. I went over a few times and never heard anything about it
I think the upper limits are mostly there for two reasons. To give the students a rough idea of what’s expected in scope and also to protect the person from having to grade a 100 page thesis when they planned to grade a short essay.
That being said, there were a few times where they enforced strict page limits for us, but in those cases they would warn us about it explicitly multiple times.