Abstract

Higher education professors are faced with the task of assigning readings to students with few tools to determine how much they should read. Although academic credits serve as a general criterion, their implementation presents challenges, such as knowing the reading rate of students. The difficulties in considering the results of some studies as applicable to other realities make it advisable to look for our own data. This work provides evidence on the reading rate of law students and, in this way, aims to contribute to the rationalization of the distribution of academic workload. In order to achieve this, an empirical study was carried out with two hundred students of the Law School of the University of Chile. The results show an average of 177.91 words per minute for a text and cohort, and an average of 227.5 words per minute for another text and cohort. The study discusses the elements that can influence reading speed and the need for more information to facilitate the development of syllabus that take into account the real time that students need to perform autonomous work.