"The work load at Harvard is significantly less than what I did as an undergraduate, so I don't consider...complaints legitimate," says Professor of History William E. Gienapp who teaches History 1624: Jacksonian America, 1815 to 1845 which has about 200 pages of reading a week.

How to Manage

Whether or not students are happy with their course loads, the work must get done. If you're clever enough to get into Harvard, you must be creative enough to find ways to get around the reading.

"I try at least to look over all the reading," Kerman says. "How carefully I read it depends on the difficulty and how relevant it is."

May says the large amounts of reading teach students to glean the information they need from books ignoring the parts that are not relevant.

"I think one function of courses that are essentially non-quantitative is to give people practice in 'using' books," May says. "That is, going through them with questions in mind rather than reading page after page at a standard pace."

May's technique is common at Harvard, and many students have become accustomed to the analysis that accompanies each of their reading assignments.

The difference between high school reading and college reading is that in high school, it's about what you read, in college, how you read it, according to Nathaniel V. Popper '02.