This is a bit hard to read. I get the information that the study is trying to communicate, and I think it is an elephant in the room in academic circles.

The problem is that reading the study feels very hostile towards the subjects, which combined with the interpretable terms of evaluation (“oversimplified terms”) gives an impression of the author just wanting to deprecate the students.

Including phrases like “breathing hard for two minutes” or “chair creaking” in the transcript pushes that idea further. It does not picture an environment where the students would be comfortable stopping to think for a while or checking sources.

Also, the choice of Dickens as the single used material, while reasonable as potential assigned material to the students, seems again like a setup against the students, because its difficulty lies precisely in the period references and social satire.

It’s an author whose difficulty increases with each passing generation as the context becomes more foreign due to time passed.