Preparing for College Rigor

As an undergraduate college student, you can expect to read between 100-600 pages per week for your courses. Being a strong reader is a necessity in higher education. This is not a skill you can turn on like a light switch when you start college; you must prepare now by reading continuously, consistently, constantly.

This visual shows what actual first year college English/Humanities classes require for reading (taken from actual syllabi for these courses).

Stanford - quarter system (quarters are 10 weeks long)

UC Berkeley, CSU Fresno, and FCC - semester system

This link is for the reading schedule for Columbia University's first year required Literature Humanities course.

Top colleges/universities expect that you have had a certain level of reading preparation before you get to their schools.

The reality is our school, and most public schools these days, do not do a good job of training you in a classical education [There are many reasons for this. The reasons are not bad, but the consequence for students who want to be successful at top colleges is that you have to supplement the reading we do at school]. Unless you have read books on your own, you have not been expected to read classic novels, Shakespeare, Greek dramas, etc. in your classes at school.

To prepare for a top level four-year university, you must supplement your reading. Here are my recommendations for what you should be reading during each year of high school to be prepared to access the level of reading rigor required to succeed at top universities and to be considered "well-read" by the time you go to college.

Many higher level texts (e.g. philosophical readings, essays, journals, articles, text books) assume a certain level of education from their readers. You will miss allusions, miss connections, and generally have a difficult time grasping concepts in college texts if you have not read widely.

On this document you will find lists of top colleges and universities. I have started hyperlinking each college to their website, but that process is not finished at this time. Of course, you can just google the names of colleges to find their school websites as well.

With the amount of valedictorians Edison graduates each year, we should have way more students attending top colleges. You attend the #1 school in FUSD. We also have a very high ranking in CA (top 8% of public high schools) and in the nation (top 6% of public high schools). Colleges know our strong reputation. You should be applying to top schools.

US and World News Rankings