In high school, I feel like my advanced STEM courses are significantly easier than my advanced humanities courses. For a person in my situation, would a STEM major really be significantly more challenging than a humanities major? If so, why?
Just curious, not planning on changing my intended focus in college.
It depends on the particular fields and the specific skills they require. I’m a math major who can’t write very well, so I probably get better grades in my math classes than I would get if I took a bunch of English classes. On the other hand, I would probably have more success with English than electrical engineering because I don’t like labs, I don’t have good intuitions about physics, and I’ve never been the kind of person who likes to take things apart and see how they work.
Why do you think your STEM classes are easier than your humanities classes?
It would be interesting to know how your scores are in STEM. I’d be surprised if humanities classes were harder than STEM classes hard enough to produce SAT2’s of 800 or AP’s of 5.
English is the only class that is harder than my STEM classes 
gotta deal erratic English teachers.
As with so many things, it depends on the person- and which STEM subject and which humanities subject. Not to mention how you define each: in the US, “STEM” includes the social sciences, whereas in Europe they are usually considered humanities. And not to mention what you mean by ‘challenging’!
STEM subjects are harder to get high GPAs in (cue CC discussion on why…), but beyond that it’s a pretty meaningless conversation. Is anthropology harder to master than history? Is organic chemistry inherently harder than ancient Greek?
The only thing that I would say is not to close yourself off too early- classes in college are just different than HS, and people grow and change. I know a fair few students who have been very surprised to find that they enjoy subjects on the other side of the STEM/Humanities divide- perhaps not as a major, but as part of their college experience.
As the late, great Maria Montessori said, the best learning experiences are ‘challenging but achievable’.
@halcyonheather I think they’re easier because of how objective they are. Numbers are either right or wrong, and writing leaves a lot of room for subjectivity.
@lostaccount I have straight As, but it takes less effort for me to retain my STEM scores.
It is certainly possible that a STEM major will be easier than a humanities major for some students, including you. This is not necessarily true for other students.
Subjective value judgements exists in STEM fields. For example, when doing engineering design, how much extra of something (e.g. effort, material, cost) is it worth to put into the design to improve some aspect (e.g. efficiency, usability, size, cost, reliability) of the final product or process by some amount? Also, STEM people need to write up their findings and designs both for others in the same field and those outside the field, although the writing skills involved are not necessarily the same as those involved in analyzing literature.
It depends really. There are some people in my major who switch to other majors like communications. It leaves a poor image in my mind since these weren’t good students. Oh well perception is reality. I often thought subjects like history, political science, and sociology were very interesting. Would I want to major in them? Maybe, maybe not. Even in STEM people have their strengths and weaknesses.
For instance my geology friends and I have a joke. You either like looking at rocks and minerals all day or you like to be a number cruncher. I like writing so I love looking at rock formations and writing down notes. My other friends are bored to tears and would rather calculate stream gradients. So even in the same major people can have differing views on which part of geology is easier vs what’s harder.
Don’t pick a major on what you think is harder vs easier. Pick a major that you will enjoy and has multiple career opportunities you can see yourself doing.