But many times in my career as a student I felt like I was one of the few who came to class having read the material that was asked to be read (speaking of undergrad and graduate school college level here). I assume many people read the book but not necessarily on the time schedule requested. If you asked students to read the material AND watch a lecture before class...I can only imagine that I there would be even less who had done the all the prep work.
At university I very rarely had time to read screeds of material before classes. After all I had 6 to 10 courses at any one time and there was no co-ordination of workload. Usually things got done in order of due date. I did preread labs and prewrite the bits I could - that way I could knock the lab report out in the same day and cross it off the list.
I just occurred to me how much easier some things must be now with computers and the internet (computers did exist but they weren't really used and most people didn't have them.
