College English majors can't read
100 comments
·May 23, 2025ageitgey
mppm
> You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.
I would rate the amount of specific context necessary to understand a random snippet of kernel code much higher than what you need for that Dickens passage. It's certainly much more dense with metaphor and playful use of language than normal prose, but I don't find it that opaque, even as an non-native speaker.
> The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".
Well, yes, but that doesn't necessarily contradict the article. The bell curve at the bottom basically says that the comprehension they were expecting is in the top 3% or so, not the 60% of the general population who "have to get a degree". Add in all the Netflix and TikTok casualties, and the result ceases to be surprising.
seydor
> most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them
The inability to understand sarcasm on the internet is far worse today than it was 10 years ago, and i don't think this can be explained by the influx of larger audience, because this keeps happening in very niche communities. It's something happening globally, even in non-english countries. my guess is it has to do with the dumbing-down of popular media (the internet) to the point where words are removed and only emoji are left (which severely limits the bandwidth of conversation)
loudmax
It can be hard to convey sarcasm, especially in writing, and especially when you don't know the actual stance of the person writing.
If I mention "big beautiful tariffs" in a peer group of liberals, they can assume I'm being sarcastic. If I'm posting anonymously on the internet, then who knows, maybe I genuinely reject the economic orthodoxy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
In this context, emoji might actually be helpful in expressing sarcasm. Big beautiful tariffs :roll_eyes:
ethbr1
Aren't emojis short-hand context that lowers reading/writing requirements though?
I could express anything an emoji expresses strictly through words.
But over-relying on emojis might atrophy my ability to do so, over time.
ordu
> You can’t blame demographic shifts or foreign students on these results
I don't think that it matters. I'm not a native speaker and I did on that sample better then the most. I'm just one point of data, but I believe what does matter is not a proficiency with English itself, but with reading in general. English of Dickens is hard ("the waters had but newly retired" took me a minute to parse), but I can see what I can't understand, so I can spend time on it and get it.
Probably I could miss with "Michaelmas". In hindsight after reading the article I see it ends with "-mas", like "Christmas", but I'm not sure I'd look up it in Google if I took the test seriously.
OTOH, I noticed this "The student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily", and it made me think, that the student was nervous. But why? And why the researchers didn't tried to reduce stress levels? Stress makes intellectual tasks harder. I know it from my own experience, the worst kind of stress for me is when I believe that I have very limited time for a task. In these situations I could do unbelievable dumb things.
Ferret7446
Hypothesis: US students are disconnected from real humans, thanks to social media. Reading is one half of communication, and you need to understand people to understand their intentions through text. A reality built on TikTok feeds is incapable of interpreting the writings of someone who doesn't binge the Web.
otteromkram
> And why the researchers didn't tried to reduce stress levels?
The student is under stress due to their struggle with the passage, which the author isn't taking creative liberties to describe as that's how most people will react.
The time constraint wouldn't be an issue if they were comfortable with the passage. You can give them unlimited time and they might provide a sufficient response, or just quit and move along in the study, which also stated in the reading.
And, with all due respect, I think you're probably giving yourself more credit for your ability to perform better than these students than what might be the actual result, but that's not atypical for me online community, whose denizens are a cut above the rest...
This was also noted in the study:
* [...] However, these same subjects (defined in the study as problematic readers) also believed they would have no problem reading the rest of the 900-page novel.
Keep in mind that the students were English majors, so understanding complex classical works might be expected at some point.
ordu
> The student is under stress due to their struggle with the passage, which the author isn't taking creative liberties to describe as that's how most people will react.
It doesn't look for me as a satisfactory explanation. Were they stressed because they were forced to think hard, or were they stressed because they were afraid to show their incompetence to a professor? Or maybe some other reason?
If the process of thought makes students stressed, then I don't know what can be done. But if they were afraid of a professor, then this stress factor could be and should be removed. For example, I can imagine how they chose to guess instead of thinking things through because they felt that a long thinking can look bad in professor's eyes. If so then students didn't even tried to read carefully, they were guessing, and the question arise: what the study had measured in this case?
> And, with all due respect, I think you're probably giving yourself more credit for your ability to perform better than these students than what might be the actual result
Why do you think so? I have read the text, I really spent some time on it, because it was hard for me (I mentioned specifically that I was confused for a minute by "but newly" stuffed inside of "had retired"). Then I read samples of students interpretations of the text. I believe that this is enough by itself to believe that I was better. For example, I understood that there was no megalosaurus despite being confused by "but newly". Still I had looked into the original article and had found the interpretation of a "single proficient reader", to compare it with what I've got from the text. The most interesting finding: they completely ignored megalosaurus like I did.
The only catch is I've read just one paragraph, while students were reading more of them, but I don't think it will change the results significantly. I can become bored or overconfident and students can get hang of Dickens' language after a couple of paragraphs so they will show better performance than me, but I don't believe it.
avidiax
> In fact, none of the [problematic readers] ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.
> these students had full use of dictionaries and even their phones when reading the passages. They were free to look up and search any terms they didn’t recognize. But these resources did not help them understand the text.
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> I found that a majority of [English majors] had a lot of trouble understanding metaphor and allusion in the assigned reading, couldn’t grasp even obvious themes and character motivations, and could not reliably construct grammatically correct sentences in their own writing.
> Almost all of them went on to be awarded BAs in English.
I feel there's multiple factors in all of this, but the central spiral could be summarized as corrupting economic pressure on learning that forces schools to reduce rigor for the sake of increasing the passing rate.
There could be an inclusion bias however. Long ago, only a select few students would go to college. If we looked at the test results of 2024 students that also would likely have gone to college had they been in the class of 1960, would we see such a difference?
staticman2
There's an interesting disconnect between readers who read for the "painting with words" aspect of novels and readers who read solely for the plot.
My first impression on quickly reading that passage is it was very muddy, very very muddy, and nothing plot important had happened yet, but we need dinosaur metaphors to say just how muddy it was.
For someone reading for the plot the text did not contain a lot of information.
dambi0
How much plot could one or two paragraphs from a wider body of work contain?
We do learn more than it’s just muddy. For example the Lord Chancellor is somewhat introduced. We know the time of year. We know it’s been muddy for a while. We know the time of year. We know some term has finished so it’s likely that less people are around or it is quieter than usual. Whether these are relevant to the whole plot we can’t tell from such a short passage but that is true of any extract.
staticman2
Doesn't Dickens want us to read the text slowly and imagine a dinosaur stomping around after the flood, horses and dogs dealing with the weather, and all sorts of visuals?
It's not about the amount of words but what is expected by the reader parsing them. The reader is expected to spend a lot of time imagining the non- plot stuff.
dagw
One would hope that someone choosing studying literature at university would at least be slightly interested in the literary arts.
However I suspect that 'English' might also end up being the default major for many people who don't particularly know what they want to study and aren't particularly adept or interested in any specific area.
marsupial
what you speak of is difference between literature and mere communication. Painting with words is essential in lit even if you do not notice. Maybe Beethoven writes chord progressions leaves it at that?
but in clarity yours is a STEM technical writing approach. Fine for stem, not fine for an English major. Muddy. Very very muddy. Relevant only to the carriage schedule and whether murderer gets gunk on his boots. True often for ersatz writers and professional emails. But mud fog BLEAKNESS gestures here maybe to social decay, anomie, listlessness, an eternal stupor, impotence of characters and so on. This is also communication by painting. The painting has a point for the plot AND your pleasure.
Would you prefer novel by bullet points?
staticman2
>what you speak of is difference between literature and mere communication.
So a novel is not literature unless it uses your preferred writing style?
>But mud fog BLEAKNESS gestures here maybe to social decay, anomie, listlessness, an eternal stupor, impotence of characters and so on.
That passage doesn't introduce any "characters". Perhaps Lord Chancellor will turn out to be one of the novel's characters, but that remains to be seen.
> The painting has a point for the plot AND your pleasure.
There's no need to be so confrontational.
Isaac Asimov is nowhere close to being my favorite writer but I offer this for your amusement. In his autobiography "I, Asimov" he talks about his simple writing style:
>Before Pebble in the Sky was published, Walter Bradbury asked me to do another novel. I did and sent in two sample chapters. The trouble was that now that I was a published writer, I tried to be literary, as I had in that never-to-be- forgotten writing class in high school. Not nearly as badly, of course, but badly enough. Brad gently sent those two chapters back and put me on the right track.
>"Do you know," he said, "how Hemingway would say, 'The sun rose the next morning'?"
>"No," I said, anxiously (I had never read Hemingway) "How would he say it, Brad?"
>Brad said, "He would say, 'The sun rose the next morning.'
>That was enough. It was the best literary lesson I ever had and it took just ten seconds. I did my second novel, which was The Stars, Like Dust-, writing it plainly, and Brad took it.
ethbr1
Parent was a bit over-confrontational and defensive, but I think it suffices to say that there can be many types of art.
Géricault, Mondrian (early and late), and Standard Highway Signs [0] are all art, but with different goals and paths to getting there.
That an author chooses florid prose doesn't make them superior or inferior to others, aside from the skill with which they wield language.
Some people prefer stop signs. Some like The Raft of the Medusa. Plenty of room for everyone.
[0] https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/kno-shs_2024-release-status/index...
wink
That was a very good summary where some friends and I very much disagreed how much we enjoyed GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire where they praised the detailed descriptions and me being like "He wrote two paragraphs about how the cloak was red, that's one not overly long sentence".
echoangle
From reading the examples, it just looks like the subjects weren't properly motivated. If you read a hard text and just say the first thing that comes to your mind and immediately continue to the next sentence, of course you're going to do bad. But if your performance doesn't matter, why would you spend double the time and do it properly?
Cthulhu_
> But if your performance doesn't matter, why would you spend double the time and do it properly?
Pride? Dignity? I wasn't tested but still read the text with the intent to comprehend it. The people tested made nonchalant guesses, but given they were all English students, you'd expect them to have intrinsic motivation / pride.
maximus-decimus
We must have interacted with very different students in our lives if you think students will put any effort whatsoever in a test whose results have no consequence.
Hell, at my jobs people take pride in hacking their way through security training instead of watching the 5 minute video.
dooglius
I think pride would push one in the opposite direction: a prideful student wouldn't want to be seen having to look something up in front of the interviewer.
echoangle
You're talking about college students. They probably (think they) have better stuff to do than help some researcher study how good their english is.
gadders
I wonder if they would get the same result with that passage with British-English speakers.
I've never read a Dickens novel, but a lot of the context there seems obvious to me.
strken
That's an interesting question. I was thinking that my Australian English would cope a lot better with this; conversely, I sometimes struggle to cope with American English literature on the first read-through.
gadders
I was trying to think what the US equivalent text would be. I don't think US text gets that arcane, though.
octo888
While a valid point I don't think it is expecting too much for an English major to be familiar with the literature of the country of origin of the language they're studying?
If I were studying Spanish literature I wouldn't dream of not studying Iberian Spanish literature
dagw
While a valid point I don't think it is expecting too much for an English major to be familiar with the literature of the country of origin of the language they're studying?
I guess the big question is where in their study are they? I'm assuming it's perfectly possible to get through high school in the US without ever studying any 19th century UK literature. I certainly got through school in England without studying any US literature at all.
If we're talking students a few weeks into their first term at University then it is not at all surprising that they've never read any literature from England. If on the other hand they're a few weeks from graduating, then it would be much more surprising.
octo888
Yeah valid. I was thinking last year of undergraduate to post-grad.
gadders
A fair point.
hnburnsy
Go follow @nyttypos and you will find that the 'best' journalists in the world at the NY Times make 50+ published grammar, style guide, factual, and comprehension errors per day. Example: 73 errors yesterday...
NooneAtAll3
it's interesting to try to guess *how* the mistakes got made as they are
e.g. in "as if ... , and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus" that subject saw the comma as the end of hypothetical - and meeting a dinosaur isn't that strange in our contemporary storytelling. "This is too strange" failsafe has disappeared?
"addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief" - I have no idea if subject didn't know what advocate is, but advocate being an animal wouldn't be strange nowadays (in fantasy).
"Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall" - I managed to misread this sentence twice: first with "Michaelmas' term" (as in someone's term in power) and then "inner hall". Had I been the one explaining, I'd say "I have no idea who these 2 are, but I'll wait later in the text to find out that mystery"... Point against me, I guess?
Also, it's a bit sad that "-saurus" doesn't get recognized as dinosaur anymore :(
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but my personal, internal, experience - is that I would skip (at least in my mind) the text that was displayed in here. I'd want to find who is the hero, and what's the plot about - letting the "it was muddy, but in 1000 words" pass me by
8f2ab37a-ed6c
Is it possible that the whole thing is explained by incentives?
Getting a four year college degree is a mandatory rite of passage into the middle class these days.
It almost doesn't matter what you do as long as you get the piece of paper and you can move on with your life. Everybody's incentives are aligned: the school will graduate you and make their money, the students will get their degree, and eventually a job, the employers.. well, not sure, but I guess they'll filter for the signal that their candidate is able to complete something long and tedious.
rahimnathwani
"I guess they'll filter for the signal that their candidate is able to complete something long and tedious"
That signal is pretty weak, though. Would you rather hire an English major who graduated from one of these two colleges, or a high school graduate with a good SAT score?
dagw
Would you rather hire an English major who graduated from one of these two colleges, or a high school graduate with a good SAT score?
Depends on what my incentives are on the hiring end. Many jobs default to requiring a college degree, and hiring someone without one would require a lot of extra work on my end. Also hiring a high school grad over a college grad would involve me putting my reputation on the line by implicitly vouching for them. If the high school kid can't do the job I will get blamed for the bad hire since I broke the procedures put in place to prevent such a thing from happening. I the college graduate sucks at the job, well these things happen, you did what you could.
rahimnathwani
I should have been more specific about what I meant :)
Your answer is reasonable but, it's entirely about the principal-agent problem.
What if you were the boss, and you were accountable only to yourself and your family?
apothegm
Or maybe college English majors aren’t familiar with archaic meanings of common words like “retired” and “wonderful” that are used differently than they were 175 years ago?
null
I'm a big fan of Bleak House. The opening chapter is one if my favorite bits of Dickens. But it is a silly selection to expect a random undergrad from a state school in middle America to be able to fully parse on command unless they have some familiarity with London / Dickens or are in the midst of studying it. It's a book that you have to want to read or it is going to be a slog (saying this as a state-educated American).
The intro chapter is written more like a Shakespearean speech to be read aloud than a narrative chapter. The rest of the book isn't nearly so flowery.
Terms like chancery, Michaelmas, Lincoln's Inn Court, Lord Chancellor, etc, are a foreign language to an American but pretty obvious to an educated Brit in London, especially if they have familiarity with the court system.
You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.
The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".