What does that have to do with anything? I wasn’t arguing anything about “a strong math/science kid” performing well or not well in engineering.
I think there are different mindsets at work. I think some disciplines / people believe that grading should or must put people on a curve - that grading isn’t “successful” unless it falls along some kind of bell curve where only a handful of people get A’s. And then there’s a different mindset -if most people gets A’s because they’ve truly mastered whatever, what’s wrong with that?
I would submit that in the real world, as an employer / manager, I have no need to evaluate my employees and “force” them to fall into a bell curve, because my job is to make them all be A- / A performers - and if they all are, I’ve done my job well and should be celebrated.
Yes, and I think the evidence for that kind of thinking is glaringly obvious here. This is called a bias. The bias that goes along with that is that students who choose majors (or colleges) which grade on that particular kind of a curve are more intelligent and more capable. What a load of crap.
http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf (figure 3) indicates that grading in humanities is about 0.3 higher than in the natural sciences, while grading in the social studies and engineering is about 0.2 higher than the natural sciences (so humanities grading is about 0.1 higher than the social studies and engineering). Of course, there can be considerable variation between schools (the gray circles, squares, and triangles on the figure), departments within each category (perhaps, at a given school, philosophy grades higher or lower than English, for example), and individual instructors or courses.
So, while humanities may give higher grades on average, the average grading difference is not that much easier (0.3 is commonly the difference of a + or - at schools where that matters), and variation across schools, departments, and instructors may be much greater than that.
Data sucks when it doesn’t match your beliefs.
All STEM majors are required to take classes in humanities, but humanities majors are rarely required to take beyond 1 or 2 basic STEM classes. As such, STEM majors know which classes are the easier ones. To argue that a class in Sociology or Communications or Gender studies is as difficult as a class in Quantum Physics or Electrical Circuitry is beyond ridiculous. Only a non-STEM majors who’ve never taken high level STEM classes could make such a argument. The majority of would be STEM majors drop out of their major by the time they’re sophomores or juniors, mostly to go into the humanities. When was the last time anyone heard of an English or Communications major dropping out of their major and going into Mechanical Engineering?
There is a reason why Med schools require you to report 2 GPAs, a science GPA for all your required science classes, and a cumulative GPA. For those who didn’t ace everything, 99% have lower sGPA than cGPA. There’s also a reason why CS or CE majors start at $100k in top IT firms, while English or Economics majors, if they could get a job at all, start at $50k, unless they are from top schools and go on to Wall street. The unemployment or underemployment of humanities majors are sky high compared to STEM majors. Why? Supply and demand. There are a lot more humanities majors than STEM majors. Why? Because those degrees are much easier to get. To argue against reality is a waste of time.
I think it’s a mistake to judge people on the basis of their college major, especially at the better colleges, which comprised the bulk of the colleges mentioned on the list that started this thread. At the better schools, even the gender studies majors probably took and aced AP Calc and AP Physics in high school – and they liked it. At the better schools kids study what they do for a reason and it has nothing to do with fear of numbers or hard work. The people on this thread are not a random collection of folks at pro football game where the STEM types are likely to be more intelligent and driven than the non STEM types.
And Wall St isnt the only place kids make money coming out of school with humanities degrees. The starting pay at Mondelez, General Mills, Newell Rubbermaid to name a few is way better than 50K. The Sheldon Coopers might start out higher than most, but they tend to stay pretty close to where they started.
Precisely. Your comment is not an opinion. It is a fact. Who do the Elite schools love, and whom do they admit as a priority among the non-hooked? Students equally superior in STEM and non-STEM. This has been true for years, by the way, not just recently. Example: The two top students in my daughter’s high school class chose to major in humanities fields at HYP, but they were the only two promoted to AP Calc BC after AB, over the so-called STEM-oriented students, who were not promoted. And they also excelled over the science-oriented students in other courses, garnering awards for science performance.
I can cite many other similar examples, but I have no use for most of the misinformation and mythology on this thread, so I won’t waste my time. Once again, ignorance and arrogance reigns.
(Thank you, @doubtful )
Biology is the most popular STEM major (about as popular as all kinds of engineering combined), but has relatively poor major-specific job and career prospects at the bachelor’s degree level. So many biology graduates have to search for jobs that are not major-specific, just like many graduates in other majors. Career surveys by universities indicate that biology graduates do about as well as those in other majors where there are limited major-specific job prospects.
Hmm…lets see how much the CTO or Chief Architect makes at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Cisco, etc…
I have a BS and MS in electrical engineering and have also completed the pre-med classes. I found quite a few of my humanities classes to be more difficult than electrical engineering classes. Overall, the fields where I found it easiest to achieve high grades were computer science, statistics, chemistry, and electrical engineering in that order. I found humanities classes that based grades on arbitrary things without a clear methodology (for example papers focusing on quality of writing) to be more challenging. I also found classes that focused on rote memorization of topics that did not interest me to me more challenging. I expect that I am in the minority and most would find physics or EE more challenging than humanities. However, there are plenty of exceptions, particularly among persons who choose to major in physics, EE, or similar.
The primary reason is because science GPA is more relevant to med school admissions. It’s a similar idea to how many people list 2 GPAs on their resume – their major GPA and their overall GPA. They don’t list their major GPA because their major has more difficult classes. They list it because their classes in their major are more relevant to their resume.
If you look at MDApplicants,com members, far fewer than 99% of members have lower sGPAs than cGPA. Instead it’s a roughly even split between higher cGPA and higher sGPA. For example, 997 members had a science GPA above 3.8 and combined GPA below 3.8, while 1122 members had a combined GPA above 3.8 and combined GPA below 3.8. So among applicants who had 1 GPA above 3.8 and 1 GPA below 3.8, 47% had a higher science GPA and 53% had a higher combined GPA. That sounds like a roughly even split to me without a clear bias towards higher science GPA or higher combined GPA.
Depends. If you are moderately talented in a technical role, yes you definitely have a ceiling.
If you are brilliant in a technical role, you have no ceiling. Likewise, if you are moderately talented in a technical role but have great leadership, marketing, or business skills, you have no ceiling.
Oh please. There are a lot more engineering majors that can analyze Chaucer than there are humanities majors that can understand and apply differential equations.
Technical roles have a reliably higher base. Then if the career progresses up the mgmt ladder, then the sky is the limit.
I am tired of seeing numbers from Pay Scale and LinkedIn as measure of college success.
People who devote their life for discoveries in math and sciences, for public causes, for arts, for ideas,… make little money and their goal is not to make money.
I had the opportunity to hear Samantha Power speak at my daughter’s graduation ceremony last Monday. She is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning author and US Permanent Representative to the United Nations. She majored in history at Yale. Her contributions to public services are huge. It’s hard to equate her contributions to money amount.
More generally (and not dependent on technical or non-technical), if you are highly talented in something highly valued by others, your ceiling will be higher than if you are less talented or your talent is not valued by others.
In this controversial Duke study, Arcidiacono found the natural sciences, engineering, and economics were considered “more difficult, associated with higher study times, and are more harshly graded than their humanities and social science counterparts”:
http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/grades_4.0.pdf
The first public intellectual I can remember to broach this taboo is Charles Murray. In a three part series for the WSJ in 2007, he said the following:
“But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough”.
Fwiw, Murray is a Harvard grad (unhooked) with a PHD from MIT. Interesting, to say the least.
Thanks for clarifying that he was unhooked. All the new diplomas are going to specify that. That really irks this guy (hooked), so I’m going to send him your way! http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/05/where-football-meets-astrophysics/
Which do you think had a greater impact on admissions selectivity – being unhooked or being admitted more than 50 years ago?