Poll: Minimum page count for school work.

[omega 616]

During my years in the public school system I had to write papers on many occasions and usually the teacher would tell us it had to be X page(s) long. After writing a couple of these I began to wonder, what is the point of having a minimum page count?

The way I see it, if someone can eloquently express everything they need in one page then forcing them to write five just means they're going to have to fill their essay with useless fluff. If they can't express what they need in however much they write then it should come up during the editing process anyways.

Or you could go into the settings and change every comma, full stop, question and exclamation mark from size 12 to size 14 or 16 if you really want to boost the page numbers. You would be surprised to find out how much the actually adds to the amount of space taken up, turning a 1 page essay into 2 maybe 3 pages.

On topic. it's to stop kids from putting the most basic answer. Where I am from it is usually so many words, like "you must write 3,000 words".

Just gets kids talking rather than writing the equivalent of "this" or "they just do".

 

[Retal19]

Minimum Page is death for me. I have very small writing on paper naturally, unless I'm writing with the express intention of having it scanned into a Computer, which I don't do as I have a Graphics Tablet. I have very good eyesight, so it looks fine to me, but when I hand up my work, I realise it's about a quarter of the length of my peers work. It doesn't have any less quantity in it, but because when I am finishing up a single page when they're finishing up four, I'm often told it's not enough before its even read and have to redo it while everyone's starting the next question. It's hell, and as such I much prefer it when I'm in a Higher Tier, because they tend to give word limits instead of page limits, so when I hand my work up, the teacher has to read it and see I've written as much as my peers. It doesn't lessen my fears during exams when I hand up one page and everyone else is asking for extra pages to write on though.

For me, Minimum Page bad, small writing, looks like small lazy work. Minimum Word good, many words, just looks like few.

 

[teqrevisited]

I can see why it's there and it's probably the best way to go about it.

I often found that when I was asked to bloat an essay with so much unnecessary bullshit I ended up learning more, even if they're just the slightest obscure details, about the subject matter just so that I could get another few paragraphs.

That was, of course, if I bothered to do it at all. You wouldn't have caught me writing something for geography, history or R.E.

 

[Wushu Panda]

During my years in the public school system I had to write papers on many occasions and usually the teacher would tell us it had to be X page(s) long. After writing a couple of these I began to wonder, what is the point of having a minimum page count?

The way I see it, if someone can eloquently express everything they need in one page then forcing them to write five just means they're going to have to fill their essay with useless fluff. If they can't express what they need in however much they write then it should come up during the editing process anyways.

Because what they might think is "eloquently expressing everything they need in one page" is probably complete bullcrap. You're probably in high school? What do you really know about "eloquently expressing everything they need in one page"? You've written a ton of short stories and work assignments, but the higher in education you go the more and more you have to explain your reasoning. You're still young, and setting a minimum will force you to write out what you do know...if you hit the minimum then great, however, if you fall short, you'll be forced to look over the material again to find more substance. This will help with analyzing skills, critical thinking, and help you look more intently at the information given.

Likewise, the higher education goes, so does the minimum requirement. In College writing 10 page papers is every other class for an end-of-semester paper. To complete my Bachelors I had to write a min. 25 page Thesis. I came up a few pages short and started looking over all my notes and research for anything I might've missed and sure enough I had.

The more you want to "eloquently express" something, doesnt mean you use less pages, it means you use more.

 

[dubious_wolf]

Yes because students are typically lazy.
There are always the exceptions please don't take this personally. It was in no way meant to insult you. Typically though it's the case. Maybe if we taught interesting things that people wanted to learn we wouldn't need page minimums.

Also I think the OP is speaking of TYPED pages. Not hand written. Most instructors these days are aware your hand writing is different.
Typically it's also required that it's double spaced, and point 12 Times New Roman (gods how I hate TNR font.)

 

[RastaBadger]

There should be minimum page counts for some things but it should never be that high. Some things should certainly have a minimum of a page or maybe two just to stop lazy people from writing a few lines then handing it in but never as high as 5 pages.

 

[dubious_wolf]

During my years in the public school system I had to write papers on many occasions and usually the teacher would tell us it had to be X page(s) long. After writing a couple of these I began to wonder, what is the point of having a minimum page count?

The way I see it, if someone can eloquently express everything they need in one page then forcing them to write five just means they're going to have to fill their essay with useless fluff. If they can't express what they need in however much they write then it should come up during the editing process anyways.

Because what they might think is "eloquently expressing everything they need in one page" is probably complete bullcrap. You're probably in high school? What do you really know about "eloquently expressing everything they need in one page"? You've written a ton of short stories and work assignments, but the higher in education you go the more and more you have to explain your reasoning. You're still young, and setting a minimum will force you to write out what you do know...if you hit the minimum then great, however, if you fall short, you'll be forced to look over the material again to find more substance. This will help with analyzing skills, critical thinking, and help you look more intently at the information given.

Likewise, the higher education goes, so does the minimum requirement. In College writing 10 page papers is every other class for an end-of-semester paper. To complete my Bachelors I had to write a min. 25 page Thesis. I came up a few pages short and started looking over all my notes and research for anything I might've missed and sure enough I had.

The more you want to "eloquently express" something, doesnt mean you use less pages, it means you use more.

Plus there's a point that "eloquence" becomes a sound byte. And Fox News does so love it's "eloquence"...

 

[Tigurus]

My teacher told us that he doesn't care how much it is. If you can put all the work in 1 sentence. It would be better than 5 pages of shit. *nods*

 

[s0p0g]

nope, that's totally stupid as;
i mean, most girls at school used to have a handwriting about three times (!) the size of mine, and left about as much more space between words. and the beginning of a line. and at the end of it.

so when they wrote let's say five pages, and i "only" wrote one and a half, they actually did not produce (if at all) that much more than i.
now, i don't care if some girls did write all bubbly and big and bloated and whatnot, but this one time a teacher told me my test would have got a better mark - if it had not been so short. aargh!


now, to demand a certain range is a totally different thing, if loose enough (let's say 8-12 pages or something like that)

 

[countrysteaksauce]

Minimum page counts exist because its much harder to get your point across concisely. Anyone who has had to slim down an essay knows it much more difficult than writing more.

 

[emeraldrafael]

Depends on the grade and type of assignment. Recently in a business writing course Ive been dealing more with page maximum, not minimums.

 

[MammothBlade]

I absolutely HATE minimum word counts, because I like to state things in as few words as possible.

 

[Keava]

Because otherwise students would write 4-5 sentences top. It's not that hard to fill pages with nothing substantial while still keeping on topic. Not to mention You can always use smart text-formatting.
It exists simply to make the ... "less eager" part of class to actually put some effort in their work.

Personally I always preferred the word-limit assignments as those actually are useful if You ever plan to write for a magazine or newspaper.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

It shouldn't be a minimum page count as I always found it unfair that I would write nearly double what some people write usually 1.5* per line and if I did not meet the quota(number of pages) I would be told it was too short. This is the biggest problem with page count method. I think the word count method is much better than the page count as it is more equitable and a hell of a lot harder to abuse. I would like to add that this forced expansion has probably had an effect on the length of my forum posts.

Anyway the general idea behind these bare minimums is to make sure you have the work done, have done research on the top and can expand your ideas into the allotted space required. Many people like to say that to be intelligent your writing must be concise and to the point. I would say this is just laziness on the reader's part and someone who is really intelligent can write a concise answer as well as an expanded in depth answer that would be worthy of being called an essay.

So basically it is to see how much writing you can do and keep a certain quality standard before it devolving into a boring mess.

 

[bliebblob]

Just chiming in here to drop this gem:

In university you usually get a MAX nr. of pages.

But yeah a min. word count is ok with me as it gives you a good idea of what is expected: just a few paragraphs or a complete novel.
It has to be a reasonable nr. though, otherwise you are just learning how to pad out text.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Because people are lazy and if there wasn't a minimum page count no one would write over 2 or 3 pages.

Also because schools are stupid and just give you a crap ton of busy work.

 

[Hipsy_Gypsy]

I was about to click "Yes" until I remembered that many people would use line spacing and/or increase the size of their font to give off the impression they've written more, so I chose "In certain cases" instead. That and it also depends on what exactly you've been asked to do.

I think the idea of a minimum page count is to force the students to expand on their ideas and provide enough reasoning to support their position. It's more to get them in the habit of fully expressing an idea rather than just stating a position.

This is a very good reason as well. I always tendedd to type, and still do so, in size ten or eleven so that would knock off haf a page or so of what I would have in reards to page count. Unless I'm writing a script or screenplay. Then it always has to be size twelve, in courier. Always.

 

[Hawgh]

Occasionally, it would make sense. Assuming an assignment where you should attempt to obey certain formatting rules (Artificial Newspaper, or some such). Otherwise, no. Being relieved from pointless verbosity is one of the great reliefs upon reaching University level.

Of course, then they start demanding articles containing an entirely new addition to some branch of computer science, with all the necessary background, in less than ten pages. And you start to realise how nice it was back when writing more instead of less was rewarded.