Is it common for undergraduate students to feel overwhelmed by the reading assignments? How to deal with it?
You don't need to read from the first word of the title to the last word of the conclusion. You should learn how to skim through the large materials. Use a highlight marker to highlight important sentences, terminologies, dates.
If you find it the text lengthy, try replacing it with online videos or similar shorter texts. A book can be replaced by a single research article.
I studied IR and this was a problem I really struggled with. Given my course load I was ultimately forced to conclude that there was no feasible way to thoroughly read all of the materials assigned. I really didn't like this feeling of always being underprepared.
I don't know if this is an adequate answer, but a few comments:
- You will get a lot better at reading and writing quickly. 20% improvement is already really good! Some people are natively just faster at reading to begin with - it doesn't help to compare with them. You'll improve at your own pace.
- If you only have time to pass through an article once, I find the best way to do it is to make highlights and notes that clearly sketch the structure of the article. For example, focus on highlighting topic sentences and key quotes you might use for your paper. In the margin you can number the key points, etc. In this way, once I've read an article, I can look back at it and just read the highlights/annotations to reconstruct the whole thing, without having to delve back into each paragraph. This is also useful in discussion sections when looking for part of an article.
- You'll need to start shifting from high school mindset (do all the tasks assigned) to college mindset (do the tasks that are useful to your understanding of the topic). This was the hardest part for me. Basically: choose to carefully read the texts that seem important and influential, for example those frequently referenced and cited (Kant and Weber seem like a good place to start). You do need to do some readings in depth or you won't learn. On the other hand, if you feel some reading is useless/irrelevant/poorly written, spend a shorter amount of time on it (or, find a better alternative text covering the same topic). I guess it might be embarassing if you get called on for a text that you don't know well, but generally, the important thing is to make optimal use of your limited time in order to maximize learning. In your Kant example, it seemed like this proved true.
- Generally, I think some professors focus more on having comprehensive syllabi than on workload. From their perspective, they are adding value by pointing you to key texts that are critical in the field (and that you might have a hard time compiling for yourself). Sometimes, I got the sense that they simply didn't realize the impact on the students -- for example, assigning a whole book for reading when only 1-2 chapters were relevant for the topic at hand. Other times, we were genuinely just given references that were terrible and I could never figure out the reason they were included. Try to remember that the person compiling the course outline was trying to be helpful, and figure out what is actually helpful about what they've put together.
Finally, have you considered speaking with your professors in office hours? You can explain that you are struggling to keep up with the readings and ask if they have any tips for how you can best prioritize. They might have some helpful guidance about how you should be studying.
My understanding is that for history/political science type majors this is not an uncommon amount of assigned reading.
Here is a trick for humanities reading: read the first and last sentence only of each paragraph. That is usually enough to give you an overview of the content of the paragraph, and you can then decide if you want to read it in more detail. Doing this for a whole article can give you some idea of what the article is about and how the author structures their argument while cutting down on the reading time dramatically. Make sure you write down some quick notes about what the article covers so that if you’re writing a paper later you don’t have to skim the whole article again to figure out if it’s useful.
This routine can help you learn how to effectively skim articles and you’ll find over time that you’ll get less regimented about it.
When trying to decide what information is most important to extract from your reading, it’s helpful to look for details that you can either connect to another reading or to discussions/lectures in class.