Other parents and myself, we've speculated that part of the problem is that there are teachers who simply haven't gone to the trouble to add it all up-- not really. So they THINK that they know what it is that they're assigning, but in pragmatic terms, they haven't really thought it through.
Most of my DD's teachers don't DO the work that their students are asked to do-- for the precise reason that brilliantcp notes-- it's autograded, and they don't really "handle" it other than as a-- well, a "facilitator" I think is how many of them see themselves at this juncture.
In an online school setting, this is somewhat more defensible than in a brick-and-mortar one, I have to say.
I can imagine reading that kind of volume because it was my lot pretty much every term-- at the end of finals week, when I had as little as 36 hours to get through it all before submitting grades. I surely wouldn't have signed myself up for it otherwise, though.
Here's the problem that I have noticed among my DD's cohort, though-- there are too many classmates whose ONLY hope of passing the AP class is to do it with volume rather than quality... ergo, volume and the willingness/ability to shoulder super-human AMOUNTS of work is the route to a good grade. The classes themselves now no longer revolve around "rigor" in the authentic sense, but around Rigor in the FAUX sense-- and with it, a crazy amount of busywork, studded with authentic assignments.
I'm glad that DD doesn't have to turn in her stupid outlines or do dozens of nightly math problems. She just takes assessments, and has to KNOW the material for them, and has to produce quality writing (though we see some of the same things in the writing assignments-- too many of them, and most of them encouraging nothing more than buzzword bingo or blather).
