I had a capstone project in university where the clearest way to generate a better grade was to generate more pages.
We put all sorts of rubbish in the report to make sure it made a "thunk" sound when we handed it in. It was nearly 300 pages when it should have been 90.
The problem is, plenty will judge a report on its thickness. "It is thick, so it must be comprehensive." What percent of government reports are read cover to cover and what percentage are just ctrl+f through?
I ran into a similar situation, but decided to submit a short report anyhow. It earned one of my best grades in university. When I asked about the grade, since I ignored multiple guidelines, the response was that I said a lot more than most people even though I wrote less. It probably had something to do with my admiration of concise writing. It is something that I wish that I could accomplish more often.
Good for your professor. I always refused to impose length requirements, but I would say what a typical length for the assignment would be (always in number of words, never “pages”). If you did the job in significantly fewer words, that earned you extra points. If you went long, but every word counted, you also got extra points. But any padding, wasting my time with unnecessary words, meant a penalty.
If reports are often ctrl-F'd through for relevant information, it seems likely that many people consuming it are reading far fewer than 90 pages in total - and wouldn't have read the full shorter report.
Perhaps it is better to be comprehensive in government reports than concise, to accommodate a variety of readers who want to drill into different aspects of the report.
(Of course, a PDF may not be the best structure for this! A well-formatted HTML reference with appropriate hyperlinks may be much more useful.)
Yeah, but who is actually going to read a 7000 page report on torture or surveillance? (Assuming these reports were actually published, which they were not)
We put all sorts of rubbish in the report to make sure it made a "thunk" sound when we handed it in. It was nearly 300 pages when it should have been 90.
The problem is, plenty will judge a report on its thickness. "It is thick, so it must be comprehensive." What percent of government reports are read cover to cover and what percentage are just ctrl+f through?