<p>Disclaimer: Economics and Business Economics don't count.</p>
<p>Look, before anyone starts tripping balls, I just want to say that I'm a History major and I've taken a good variety of history, english, sociology, asian american studies, african american studies, and political science classes.</p>
<p>To be blunt, they really are all the same. It's just read a book/article and write an essay and IDs or write a short answer to many questions on a midterm and final. Personally, because they're so similar, I don't think it's that difficult to get a good grade in these classes once you've taken a couple of them to get an idea of what they're like. But some people really struggle with humanities and social sciences. Like Philosophy for example. I always thought Philosophy was another bullcrap, easy A mill major like all of the above, but apparently it's not because a lot of my friends who are Phil majors end up getting B's in some classes. That sucks. That's like getting a C in a South Campus class. Is Philosophy or any other humanities/social science really that hard?</p>
<p>The closest I've ever come to take a Philosophy class was Poli Sci 10, which is Political Theory. We read Locke and Hobbes. That was philosophical. I guess.</p>
<p>It should be noted that the average grade for philosophy majors is a B-</p>
<p>A lot of people go to philosophy with the misconception that philosophy is all BS and everyone’s right. The problem with that is that philosophy’s really intricate and careful. People generally say “it’s what you said, not what you meant” and will take what you say literally. The way you phrase a sentence can make the difference between whether you get an A or an A-; this actually happened to me in one of my classes on a paper, although even my TA admitted that maybe he should have given me the A (although i got the A in the class.</p>
<p>unlike many other NC majors, philosophy requires a lot of reflection and rereading about the material that you’ve read. For example, in a class i’m taking right now (127C) we’ve just been reading the same 4 pages of Naming and Necessity for maybe the past two weeks and i get more out of them every time i reread them. (Hell, people have done their whole dissertations on one footnote in this book!) Additionally, in another the class i’m taking right now, Kant, the book (critique of pure reason) is pretty much incomprehensible without an instructor. The distinction between words are very intricate and careful (as i noted above) like knowledge and cogniton; sensations and sensibility; empiral intuitions and a priori intuitions. you really have to watch out not to muck up the concepts.</p>
<p>i can also tell you that last spring when i took a ‘vagueness’ class over 30% of the class got a C or less. I loved it, and got an A, but i finished my final like 20min before it was due working really really hard on it (and this was on friday of finals week).</p>
<p>Ethics classes are also generally easier to BS (although you can’t do that with the harder people like Rawls or Nagel) while the other 3 (history, phil. of lang/logic/phil. of science, and metaphysics and epistemology) are not.</p>
<p>The only other NC classes i’ve taken at UCLA has been latin classes and a linguistics class and they both had high workloads but weren’t difficult to conceptualize or anything.</p>
<p>non-philosophy majors courses probably won’t examine philosophy as intricately as a major would. + i never tho’t hobbes’ state of nature very hard to conceptualize (if you want to read really good political philosophy, read John Rawls as he’s pretty much dominating the field right now)</p>
<p>I love philosophy, and am pretty good at it, but even i’d admit that i probably do worse in philosophy classes than i would in virtually any other NC major.</p>
<p>The content is philosophical, but the structure of the class is closer to the typical North Campus “read and regurgitate” than you get with Philosophy classes.</p>