A doublspaced paper, with 1in margins all around, at 12pt Times New Roman, 1500 words, is about 5 pages in LyX.
However, when a professor asks for a 1500 word essay, he says "1500 words (6-7 pages)." This is a more or less consistent trend: whatever the ex[ected page count, the word count is significantly less compared to what I do in LyX. It makes the difference for me, between a 20 page paper, and a 25 page paper. Have any other students on this list noticed this? Does LaTeX do things so differently from the popular word processors?
