Sure— It's not at all tenable right now for teachers to provide in-depth critique on long essay assignments— that doesn't make critiques with avoiding, it makes long essay assignments worth avoiding.
I took a very difficult gatekeeper exposition class at a famously rigorous university a few years ago and loved it. We had to write a ton, but I didn't mind it because when you're learning to write, you need to write a ton. And boy did we. But not all classes there were like that! Some classes, mostly classes about writing were deemed "writing intensive," but others would require little more than a few pages here and there. The standard for that scant output extremely high and the intellectual critique was often blistering; the teacher concentrated on the subject matter instead of combing 50 paragraphs for split infinitive.
Currently, I attend a significantly less rigorous university as a full-time undergrad. I have 5 classes, including an elective on the history of a particular art form. The final will be a 10 page paper and 20 minute presentation preceded by a 2 page proposal. While this class requires significantly less written output than the exposition class, the assignment will still take an disproportionate amount of my time. The teacher has many students and no TA, so each paper will receive a cursory intellectual critique, but primarily graded on format and grammar. I'll not likely have learned more than if I'd written a really tight 2/3 page paper that got several serious critiques along the way.
I took a very difficult gatekeeper exposition class at a famously rigorous university a few years ago and loved it. We had to write a ton, but I didn't mind it because when you're learning to write, you need to write a ton. And boy did we. But not all classes there were like that! Some classes, mostly classes about writing were deemed "writing intensive," but others would require little more than a few pages here and there. The standard for that scant output extremely high and the intellectual critique was often blistering; the teacher concentrated on the subject matter instead of combing 50 paragraphs for split infinitive.
Currently, I attend a significantly less rigorous university as a full-time undergrad. I have 5 classes, including an elective on the history of a particular art form. The final will be a 10 page paper and 20 minute presentation preceded by a 2 page proposal. While this class requires significantly less written output than the exposition class, the assignment will still take an disproportionate amount of my time. The teacher has many students and no TA, so each paper will receive a cursory intellectual critique, but primarily graded on format and grammar. I'll not likely have learned more than if I'd written a really tight 2/3 page paper that got several serious critiques along the way.