I‘m not super versed in sociology of education but I was always under the impression that over assigning was a real problem in undergraduate and collage setting (even in high school to an extent I heard last).

My post-modern mind went straight to thinking this was the system working as desired. We over-assign to weed out students of from lower classes such that they are more stressed and less likely to graduate, therefor maintaining a status quo of higher classes being more educated and more deserving of the fruits of the labor of the less educated working classes.

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sublinear 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Lower socioeconomic status students are getting most of their stress from elsewhere. Compromising the syllabus doesn't work. All these debates have been tried before.

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runarberg 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Classism has a way to go for the overkill. I don‘t think the post-modern interpretation is 100% correct... I think this is more complex and nuanced, but your rebuttal is not very good.

Higher classes have both the time and the space to read everything on the list. They also have the training to know where to pay attention, and what they can skim through. If you over-assign you do weed out more students, and the students you do weed out are biased against the working classes.

When I took my BSc in psychology at the University of Iceland in 2011, some of my teachers admitted to this practice (but not the purpose). They told us that the reading list was too long for any one person and that we just had to go through the abstracts and find out which papers to read carefully and which to skim over.

	▲	sublinear an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but why does someone need to be of a different socioeconomic class to have prioritization skills? I'm just saying they have the extra burden of consequences for prioritizing school. I think it's a realistic skill to need in the real world regardless. What's stopping someone wealthy from developing a toxic relationship or addiction? You can say that's trashy, and I'd agree, but that only proves my point that "class" is not that significant.