Times Newer Roman is a Font Designed To Make Your Essays Look Longer (theverge.com) 154
Chaim Gartenberg, writing for The Verge: Times Newer Roman, a font from internet marketing firm MSCHF (which you may remember from the Tabagotchi Chrome extension). Times Newer Roman looks a lot like the go-to academic font, but each character is subtly altered to be 5 to 10 percent wider, making your essays look longer without having to actually make them longer. According to Times Newer Roman's website, a 15-page, single-spaced document in 12 point type only requires 5,833 words, compared to 6,680 for the standard Times New Roman. (That's 847 words you don't need to write, which is more than twice the length of this post!)
"Academic" font? (Score:2, Insightful)
The academic fonts are Computer Modern.
Times New Roman is for people who use Microsoft software, not academics.
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I don't think THOSE kind of academics are the ones worried about padding out their essay on the ways in which various American artists view race and class as performed or performable identities.
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Right. Lines of code? Use a regular font.
Someone wants a 10,000 word essay? You give them 10,000 words.
But if someone wants a 20 page report from you, and you nail it in 16 pages, why waste time padding out sentences and belaboring your points with extra words? Flip to the wider font, fiddle your margins slightly. BOOM. 20 pages.
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Unfortunately the font doesn't work if lines of code is the metric
Please report any such academic fields to the examination boards for incompetence, as lines of code is never a fucking metric.
A good software engineer can take 1000 shit lines of code and turn them into 20. A great one will take those 20 and turn them into 50.
I doubt the analysis has been done to an adequate level to correctly predict the output in lines of code to a degree sufficient for inclusion in grading for even simple problems.
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I agree there is "plenty of this" in STEM, but at least it's not all of it. Granted, I've been out of school for 20 years, but back then the main culprits were liberal arts classes. I don't remember padding out lab reports, code was mostly judged by whether or not it worked, and my endless math/physics/materials/fluids/etc classes were almost universally scored based on the correct answer, with consolation points for work shown.
On the other hand, I wrote total BS papers in English for books that I only skim
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Depends which corner of academia you are in. Some fields almost everyone used LaTeX, some fields almost everyone uses Word (with third party extensions), some fields there is a mixture.
Re:"Academic" font? (Score:5, Funny)
Some fields almost everyone used LaTeX, some fields almost everyone uses Word (with third party extensions), some fields there is a mixture.
In the fields I know, most academics use grad students to write their papers.
Re:"Academic" font? (Score:4, Interesting)
I wrote my PhD thesis in Nota Bene, which was very good word processor for DOS. I later switched to LaTeX, because university publishers liked all that postscript shit, and I felt kind of cool being the only one in the English Department who used LaTeX. Plus, I could run it on any of the weak-ass computers the department would give me before I got to be tenure-track. It made it a little complicated to collaborate with my colleagues, but by the time that was an issue, I had other options. I did have several students who submitted graduate-level work in LaTeX though, and I insisted on it for masters or PhD theses.
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It generally takes a week of work to get a dissertation into format when the dissertation nazis in the graduate office are done with it.
I used LyX to write LaTeX, and my time was well under 15 minutes--**including** the call over something that they got backwards, and "correcting" before the call and fixing after the call. I had to manually insert a pagebreak somewhere due to the rules on figures; that was really about it.
It helped that there was an ISU thesis package for LaTeX . . .
And near the deadline,
Comic Sans (Score:5, Funny)
The academic fonts are Computer Modern.
Rubbish. In my field we use Comic Sans [theverge.com] for our most important discoveries...but that is because we are more interested in the information than the font it is written in.
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Comic sans is easier for dyslexic people to read.
Oh, I love that. Whether it's true or not, it's plausible, and beautiful for winding up people that loathe Comic Sans.
Although now I'm going to have to find out whether it's true, so that when I do wind people up I know whether I'm being malicious or honest.
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https://www.thecut.com/2017/03... [thecut.com]
"“The irregular shapes of the letters in Comic Sans allow her to focus on the individual parts of words,” Hudgins writes. “While many fonts use repeated shapes to create different letters, such as a ‘p’ rotated to made a ‘q,’ Comic Sans uses few repeated shapes, creating distinct letters (although it does have a mirrored ‘b’ and ‘d’).” The ubiquitous Times New Roman, with all its serifs, is often illegib
Re: Comic Sans (Score:2)
Really, dyslexic here and hate comic sans. Oh and it does not make things easier to read either.
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High-school objective: make short essay look long.
Undergrad objective: write essay.
Postgrad objective: squeeze 12-page paper into 8-page conference page limit.
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High-school objective: make short essay look long.
Exactly. That someone, idk 40 years after the invention of WYSIWYG editors and proportional fonts, is writing an article about this must mean that there really is nothing to report. Even I was looking at which font was the best to make my essays longer, and I've played with CP/M
But hey, it's The Verge. The people that tell you to put an extra layer of cooling paste on your CPU when your cooler already has the stuff preapplied, or the people that tell you to put your PSU in the correct way or otherwise it w
Re: "Academic" font? (Score:2)
In which case they can just use the "Make it Fit" expert make have that do all the work fiddling with font size, margins and kine spacing to pad out their work to what ever the desired page count is. It more than 20 years later and Microsoft Word still has not got the same feature, but did aquire a stupid ribbon.
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You had a paper tape reader? Luxury! We used to live a wastepaper bin in the IPC and had comptuer dots dumped on us every morning, which we ate for breakfast -- if we were lucky.
Adamcemic" font? (Score:2)
You had computer ? You were lucky !
We only had slide rulers and abacuses to compute our type setting and then ink feathers and parchment to render it !
Now snow out of my lawn both ways uphill !...
Ooops, somehow I think I botched that last one.
Re:Adamcemic" font? (Score:5, Funny)
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But it looks bigger (Score:4, Informative)
This will not help, especially if the person grading is paying attention. So what if they accuse you of changing the margins or spacing instead of identifying the actual isssue? You were most likely given a list of acceptable fonts, and Times I'm Lazy was not on that list.
Re:But it looks bigger (Score:5, Insightful)
Making your paper longer is stupid anyway. The discovery of the Double Helix was published in a two-page article. There are journals now with maximum length limits and restrictions on how many figures and tables you can include, so either stfu and say something useful or just stfu.
Adam Smith wrote a five-paragraph essay in fifty pages.
Re:But it looks bigger (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a dual degree in Business and Engineering. I was always fascinated by the concept that Business Management assignments had a minimum word count, and engineering assignments had a maximum.
It kind of fundamentally explains the differences between:
Management: Bullshit until the bull can shit no more.
STEM: If you can't explain it in a 1 liner then you haven't found the best solution.
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My degree is from a business school, but it's a BSc and not a BA.
Perhaps that's why we have word maximums, and never minimums. Who the fuck needs a minimum at even undergrad level?
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Who the fuck needs a minimum at even undergrad level?
Certified Bullshit Artists. I believe they use the letters MBA.
Re:But it looks bigger (Score:4, Insightful)
Use what's given to you well. Padding papers wastes everyone's time and is stupid. Not being able to intelligently fill space that's been given to you is stupid too.
When I was serving as a teaching assistant in grad school, each semester a student would inevitably ask how many pages their essay would need to fill of the five (double-spaced) pages we had asked them to provide. I'd always tell them that their perspective was backwards: the problem they should be having was in figuring out what they needed to cut to squeeze their arguments down to five pages. We had equipped them with a number of logical tools and the topics we were giving them were rich with nuance and avenues to explore. Even a few moments of cursory thought should have left them overflowing with ideas that would need to be cut before their thoughts could fit in five pages. If they hadn't even given the topic enough thought to fill five pages, it was doubtful they had given it enough thought to warrant a decent grade.
Then I'd sigh loudly and say, "...but if you still need some encouragement, I'll deduct additional points if you drop under four pages", simply because that was a requirement the professors had put on us.
Students who pad their paper's length—either by using a font to make their paper appear longer or by using inane speech that adds nothing of value—are missing the point and are cheating themselves out of hundreds of words that their peers will be putting to good use.
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Not being able to intelligently fill space that's been given to you is stupid too.
Maybe you should stick to one concise topic and discuss it well instead of describing several topics at length.
I have a paper on structural wage--on the impacts of minimum wage on the labor force size and distribution of income, notably considering minimum and median wage each as a percentage of the per-capita gross national income and minimum wage in terms of percentage of median wage.
In this paper, I touch briefly on Malthus to describe employment as the gateway to abundance, thus suggesting that wage
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Maybe you should stick to one concise topic and discuss it well instead of describing several topics at length.
[...]
Get your point across clearly, completely, and concisely. Don't ramble about other shit to fill space.
Agreed! As I started my comment by saying, padding papers is a waste of everyone’s time. My point, however, was that you should have given the topic sufficient thought to have a need to edit yourself for concision. If you haven’t even given it that much thought, it’s likely that you aren’t saying something worthwhile in the first place, regardless of whether you write three paragraphs or three pages in the end.
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Paul Samuelson's landmark paper on the efficient provision of public goods was only three pages in the 1954 Review of Economics and Statistics. If someone tells you to fill five and you have a landmark argument in three, "Not being able to intelligently fill the space given to you" is just being too smart to ramble for five pages about a three-page topic. You lose points, but you gain a Nobel prize.
You can't base on the premise that maybe you end up with three paragraphs, but you haven't thought enough
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I’m clearly failing to communicate here, since I don’t disagree with anything you’re arguing, yet it’s clear that you think you’re arguing against what I’m saying. My saying that people should be able to intelligently fill the space they’re given doesn’t mean that I’m suggesting they should pontificate at length when fewer words would serve them better.
I’m not advocating the padding of papers, “intelligently” or otherwise. I’m tal
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Agreed, hence the loud sigh I mentioned before I told students about the professor-mandated minimum length.
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It's funny to hear a Marxist criticize Smith for being long winded. Just how unaware are they?
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Yeah there is a very very obvious change in the appearance of the font. The better approach is to just adjust your kerning by 5%. The characters are precisely identical and it's still longer.
Helvetica (Score:2)
Helvetica was always my fluff-it-up font of choice in high school.
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Mine is Verdana.
Other tricks:
- wide margins
- increase line spacing
Then there are style tricks:
- short paragraphs
- lists are your friend
Also put as much fluff as you can: titles, headers, footers, etc...
Finally, avoid making your fonts bigger, it doesn't take as much space as it seems and it is too obvious.
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Oh, I loved margin tweaking when I was in school.
It works both ways, too. Need to page eight pages take up ten? 1.125" or 1.25" on both sides. Need to make a page and a half take up one page? 0.875" or 0.75" on both sides. Most printers don't center themselves well enough that a quarter inch on either side will be noticeable and for the ones that do, just widen the page guide slightly before loading.
I also found that using +/- 0.5pt fonts when a specific font size was mandated worked wonders on larger docum
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That's because with subtle enough tweaks, it's impossible to measure without having measurement error. The best margin to tweak is actually the right hand margin as long as you leave the Justification set to left (never fully justified). Left margin if you're in a RTL place, and again, never fully justified. This makes the right margin almost i
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That's a good point about the right margin. If you're going to tweak the left margin, also make sure to tweak the top and bottom margins. It doesn't buy you much in terms of page count, but having different-sized margins is eye catching.
And even if you have good paper, you have to have the most accurate of measuring devices to catch the 1/144 inch (~0.2 mm) discrepancy by bumping the font by half a point. If you're a teacher grading 30 papers, you're not going to break out the high-accuracy calipers. But it
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That may be why Bootstrap uses Helvetica also. Bootstrap is the king of screen-real-estate wasters (at least per defaults). It's probably done to make things easier for finger-oriented devices, but if the application will be run on desktops 90% of the time, which is the case at many orgs, then the waste adds up per scrolling etc.
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Isn't "sans serif" a generic name for fonts lacking serifs "fringes"? "Sans" means without, and serif means a flaring out or spreading out at the end.
Marketing opportunity ... (Score:5, Funny)
Trojan Newer Roman condoms look a lot like regular condoms, but each is subtly altered to make your penis look 5 to 10 percent bigger, without having to actually make it bigger. "Trojan: Rome wasn't built in a day, but it will feel that way."
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"Trojan: Rome wasn't built in a day, but it will feel that way."
And the serif enhances the pleasure. As George Carlin said, "It's not how long you make it, but how you make it long!"
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That doesn't make sense. Haven't you seen all those ancient Roman statues? All of the penises are tiny.
Well... marble is pretty cold.
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This is bullshit! (Score:4, Funny)
What kind of sick person would try to trick people into thinking people are reading more than actually are?!
Fixed-pitch fonts [Re:This is bullsh*t!] (Score:1)
Actually, fixed-pitch fonts like Courier may make a comeback in schools to make it easier for graders to verify sizing.
Either that, the submissions may be required to be in an electronic form whereby words and/or characters are machine-countable so that human graders don't have to spend time on such. The number of "pages" then is meaningless.
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While perhaps true, an instructor generally has to set a standard for size of the essay so that students have an idea of what to aim for.
I suppose you could say "approximately 4 pages", but then students will invariably ask, "How much would one be docked points if it's only 3 pages?" Rather than get into that grey area, in practice it's much simpler to say "at least 4 pages", or better yet a range: "between 4 and 6 pages".
If students play games regarding "page size" and that matters to the graders, then oth
Future textbook authors of course! (Score:2)
Oh come on! This was supposed to stay a secret! (Score:2)
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Kids These Days (Score:2)
knockoff camera gear font? (Score:2)
Pick a better name; "Newer" is a Chinese brand of cheap camera accessories.
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It's also a play on words, going from New to Newer. I don't think most people would confuse font branding with camera branding.
This guy discovered tepid water... (Score:3)
... as we say in spanish speaking countries.
All of us played with margins, spacing, and fonts (to the extent possible) to make an essay look bigger, from the times of Typewriter, even going so far as to chose the typewriter to use among the three in my house to suit my needs, the most uncofortable one (but with bigger type) for essays with a set minimum # of pages, or the most confortable one for longer essays, or when there was no preset limit.
That's why, with the advent of computers, smart teachers request the work as a PDF and count words, not pages. Yes, a word count is also open to abuse, but less than # of pages alone.
Myself, I put a minimum AND maximum limit, both on pages AND on words.
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This guy discovered tepid water! News at 11.
That's a terrible waste... (Score:4, Funny)
LOL! Did exactly this back in the 90ies! (Score:2)
I wrote my diploma thesis on an IBM luggable with an orange plasma display on Ami Pro on Windows for Workgroups. We adjusted the font with a font editor to meet the minimal pagesize. Nice to see the old tricks still in place. :-)
What a stupid idea (Score:2)
Just in time for papers to never be printed, or evaluated by page length! This font will do you no good when you're entering text into a box in an LMS with a built-in word count feature.
Also, if you can write 5,833 words on something, you can probably write 847 more. It's not like this will turn a 2-page paper into a 3-page paper.
It does not make any sense (Score:2)
Who counts the length of essays in pages anyway? (Score:2)
In the European education system I have experience with (France, UK, Germany), the length of essays was counted in words, not in pages. Stringers can be paid (at least in France) by the number of pages, but I assume that the font is imposed.
Useful for videos (Score:2)
Well, this could be challenging (Score:3)
It looks like I'll have to get that tattoo on my dick redone.
css (Score:2)
Someone tell the Chinese! (Score:2)
Just about every piece of English language text coming out of Shenzhen is Times New Roman, which is an awful font to read. If we sneak in Times Newer Roman instead, maybe I'll finally be able to read those little instruction books that come with my stinky Chinese e-gadgets.
As for essay-writing... Bookman or similar fonts are much easier to read, and give the documents a professional look that doesn't scream "I barely know how to use Word".
Can I Get a Newer Font That... (Score:1)
The Wisdom of all fonts. (Score:2)
The commentators here can be seen as the wisdom of all fonts;
Fonts vary wildly in size (Score:2)
and Times New Roman is one of the smallest fonts I've seen, making it suitable for reasonable-quality printed output only. A PDF with text in Times New Roman is painful to read until you really crank up the zoom factor.
Something like Verdana takes up twice the space.
Times New Roman was designed in 1929 for the (London) Times newspaper, with the goal of fitting as much text as possible on a page. Font design has moved on since then, fonts are available that are more readable than Times New Roman while taking
Tree Killers (Score:2)
Honestly, way to waste more paper!
This only works if... (Score:2)
...the assignment is actually printed and submitted in physical form. If they were to submit electronically and the file was opened on a device that didn't have the new font installed then it will default to a different font, possibly showing the document's true size.
What academics use pages and not words ? (Score:2)
Once i got out of highschool all of my classes had a minimum word limit, not page limit.
This must be a joke, right? (Score:2)
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Re:Absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure it's educators who really want to grade papers that way. I taught an intro-level college class and assigned a paper as a class project. I told the students that I was grading on content and described those expectations. I didn't assign a page limit and told them they needed to cover their topic thoroughly without adding fluff. Students didn't like the expectation of a brief but thorough paper and I received a lot of push back. Students would say things like "I understand, but how long does it really need to be?", indicating they wanted a page or word length guideline. I assume they got this expectation in high school. I explained that outside of academia, people want thorough but brief reports and I was preparing them for the real world. They didn't want to accept my explanation. I'm not sure it's educators who want these limits. I think students want them so they know the minimum amount of work they have to do.
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Did you give them the subject they were to write about?
Because if not, I'm sure some smart-ass student could hand in a half page paper that as thoroughly covered the topic as is humanly possible simply because it's not interesting enough to most people to have had that much information published about it yet.
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But that's where the problem is... you implicitly imposed a minimum length on the students without actually telling them what it was. How, reasonably, should a student know what expectations are upon them unless they are told in quantitatively measurable terms?
In the real world, you don't need such quantitative descriptors because people hopefully have enough experience by then to gain an intuitive understanding of ho
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How, reasonably, should a student know what expectations are upon them unless they are told in quantitatively measurable terms?
Because the students are ideally intelligent and not massive pedants who exist only to nitpick everything to the final degree. Everyone needs to deal in a world where nothing is specified completely. If the students can't cope, then they're probably not up to the task of passing.
They probably specified the paper size, margins, font size and maybe even line spacing. How are the stud
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You misunderstand my point... the teacher here was evidently trying to help the students gain an intuitive understanding of how much work they reasonably needed to do... and that's a laudable goal. However, that intuition is often only gained by experience... if they haven't yet had sufficient experience testing that out, how can it possibly be expected they would have it?
Or do you mean by "intelligent" that they are somehow gifted savants that just somehow always know what the right amount to say about
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Based on the posts I think you've made, you'll view anything that doesn't include a specific length guideline (e.g., write an eight page paper) as unreasonable. Your position isn't reasonable and it's inconsistent even with other academic expectations. For example, there's no length guideline on a thesis or dissertation. If you don't provide enough content, your committee will review your work unfavorably. If you add lots of fluff and extraneous content, your committee also won't view that favorably. A
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Agreed. In the business world, f'rinstance, I've *never* been given a limit on how many pages my report must be. Frankly, I would probably laugh. Though I've found occasionally that laughing at stuff like that is NSFW.
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I have. Sometimes self-imposed.
E.g. for some audiences the first two pages must contain everything relevant; the rest may be needed as supporting material but assume it'll never get read.
For many audiences they need something short enough to go through in a fixed amount of time. So a 40 page document is pointless if you need to get through the material in 30 minutes.
Sure, you can write a 200 page report and just present a 12 page summary. But reality is that many times in a business context your time is bet
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The grading of any paper is somewhat subjective. Unless you're looking for a specific correct answer, it's subjective. The grading of any essay is subjective.
At no point were the students graded on length. They were graded on addressing all of the points in the outline, which they turned in and got approved. That's what being thorough means. Because I reviewed all of their outlines, they were given a specific definition of what that means.
Brevity meant providing information specific to that event, rath
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I remember one professor in the computer science faculty where I studied that had a policy like that. Assignments were due at the beginning of the class on the due date, and after class started, the door was closed and locked. He had a zero tolerance for lateness, and any more than two unexcused absences were grounds for failing the course. I had this pro
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I've had very good professors who were quite lax with assignments. Though my definition of "very good" refers to how much I learned from them, not how many other students they failed.
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I'd definitely reconsider some aspects of that assignment before doing it again. This was a class for non-majors, so those steps were also to catch if they misunderstood something about the science. This was an online class. I gave students the opportunity to meet with me in person or via Google Hangouts.
I think students have different expectations about how much work they should do for an online class versus a traditional classroom setting. I recorded lectures that were roughly half the length of what
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Ha! I think the key takeaway is the final statements: "You give them a requirement that you don't really expect them to meet and they turn in something that doesn't really meet the requirement but looks like it does. That's how you prepare them for the real world."
Yep. This is how 50-75% of business managers manage. Is academia similar? I imagine so, (enter your own MBA joke here).
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"Thorough but brief" is always subjective and will never, ever be otherwise. Everyone's grade was going to be arbitrary, or more to the point, it was going to depend on how good they were at reading your mind. No wonder there was pushback!
Did you at least provide some examples of some papers that happened to fit your idea of "thorough but brief?" That would actually go a long way toward fixing the problem. They could even have a hell of a spread in length, but as long as they provided some estimates of wha
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The only time I ever recall hearing of a page count in college was as a warning that if your paper was getting that long you were probably off in the weeds.
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specify a maximum word count, and set out specific objectives for what the paper needs to contain
That was the standard approach in the early 90s when I did my degree.
Most lecturers would also add some 'ease of reading' measures such as font size and spacing, but those were exactly that, and fuck all to do with being able to concisely demonstrate an understanding of the subject.
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Obligatory Bill Gates (Score:2)
"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." — Bill Gates
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When will our "educators" finally grade papers based on content covered rather than some arbitrary word/paragraph/page length. Are they not able to judge whether a topic has been sufficiently covered by reading comprehension?
The length given is a maximum, and if you want to exceed it go ahead but you better be really sure that the content you're adding is both relevant and necessary.
My theses lengths were specified in word-counts, but I seriously doubt that the prof actually ran a wordcount on it. The word-count served as a guide as to how much detail and content they expected. Should I have made a much more significant contribution than expected, then the word-count matters not at all.
If, OTOH, your thesis is not remarkably n
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And that's why you don't try to get a 50+% increase in your paper's length using such tricks. If the teacher noticed, it wasn't a "slight" difference.
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Communications major, weren't you?
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Too. Bad. There. Is. No. Font. To. Fix. People. Who. Write. Like. This.
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