Academic rigour doesn't depend on how many pages of reading you assign, says Chronicle contributor

“Faced with the question—How much reading should we assign?—I think most instructors would agree that the best answer is: ‘It depends,’” writes Charlie Wesley for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Wesley disagrees with the idea that academic rigour can be connected in any meaningful way to the number of pages of reading an instructor assigns to a class. What ultimately matters, the author argues, is accomplishing the learning goals of the class, and this means achieving “a delicate balance between the various ability levels of students in the class, the goals and outcomes of the course, the kinds of texts being analyzed, and the methods brought to that analysis.” Chronicle of Higher Education