Unrelated: In grad school now. Still getting perfect and near-perfect scores on papers I halfassed the night before the due date. Glad to see that nothing is going to change.
Right? What department are you in? Turns out the engineering classes I'm in actually have plenty of work, and there's shitloads of reading in any topic that contributes to my general edification but not a whit to my grades (which I do because I realized it's literally what I'm paying for). But the actual writing for any liberal arts class (yay political science) is basically trivial because basically nobody knows how to write at any level of education, so I just look good by comparison. I'm not even particularly clever, I just write like this but with less profanity, slang, filler words, and familiar phrasing, and also slightly fewer run-on sentences. The only challenge is when there's a meaningful page maximum because being concise is part of the point, and there's only one guy around here who even seems to think that's a virtue.
I mean, shit, the only reason I don't have a 4.0 is law classes. Friggin' A-, why are you even a grade.
Ah, but seriously, you probably do need to do a lot of source finding ahead of time for the semester-long projects. If you're in the hard sciences, though, I've got no relevant comments to make.
Library & Information Science.
I mean, to be fair, if there are two things I'm good at, it'd be writing and researching. I didn't really get it for a long time -- from my perspective I was just sitting down and churning out material that was "good enough". Eventually, though, I started peer-reviewing (my god, this right here?
Anyone out there, if you aren't finished with your undergraduate studies already, heed this warning: If you enjoy writing or reading at all, never in your life take a creative writing class. Peer-reviewing for anything will hurt you inside, but doing it for those will break your soul.), participating in discussion boards for online classes, and reading a lot of articles that made it into print, which is about when I had my epiphany. The only time I ever felt as if I
worked to put a piece of writing together was for my undergraduate thesis, and that's mostly attributable to my advisor being hypercompetent and thoroughly dedicated, my major being small enough that she was focusing on a total of six people for that year, and the fact that it was an unholy interdisciplinary mashup of English lit and poly sci.
That said, I'm definitely in agreement regarding readings. Even more so since I'm attending online and only one of my professors even bothers to post lecture notes. Thankfully the issue of length limits hasn't really been a thing for me; one of my first poly sci professors freshman year gave a lot of assignments that were one-page policy papers that lost letter grades if you went over, never had trouble abbreviating my writing after that. Definitely wish that high schools didn't push filler and padding so much, though.