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<p>Unable to handle the content of my posts, the coward above has resorted to amateur psychology. Others in this thread tend toward the politician or lawyer, trying to bring down my reputation by picking at small errors. Sooner or later the grammarians will come out.</p>
<p>cormy3 – Do you realize that your arguments stopped being logical several pages ago (um, if it was ever logical at all)? I mean, you’re resorting to feigned “misunderstandings”, brush stroke statements, and <em>subtle</em> misdirections and insults. Any true intellectual would be wise enough to know when he’s been defeated, and concede the point with at least some of his pride left in tact.</p>
<p>I actually think I made a sound reasoning a couple pages back. More humanities majors tend to receive relatively lower scores than their math/science counterparts because of how the classes and curves are designed - not necessarily because they are less cognitively or intellectually able.</p>
<p>Because humanities classes are much more subjective, an argument could be made for, basically, anything.</p>
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<p>Dropping into this thread a little late, but is it actually common for humanities majors to have lower test scores for courses in their field? In my experience, they tend to get higher grades and more seem to graduate with 4.0s. From what I’ve skimmed through this thread (and I am totally open to being corrected if I missed something) I’ve seen people argue that standardized test scores favour math/science majors, which seems to generally be pretty fair. But your point about curves doesn’t really apply there.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m wrong, maybe humanities majors do tend to have lower grades. In my experience that’s not true, my humanities courses are where I get my easy A’s. But then again, I’m at Mudd and tend to take my humanities courses at the other Claremonts (being schools that don’t try to deflate your grades more every time a little bit of soul comes back to life).</p>
<p>EDIT: Also in my experience, the subjectivity you’re referencing is exactly one of the reasons I feel humanities classes have higher scores. When my media studies class asks me to analyze an implicit meaning in a scene, as long as I support my argument I can answer pretty much anything and be right. When my electronics/computer engineering class asks a question, there is one and only one right answer and any misstep along the way to it makes everything fail.</p>
<p>^Okay, seriously, I think I love you, marry me ._. Thank you for stating more eloquently the argument the rest of us have been attempting for 16 pages. He… really doesn’t seem capable of following a complex string of logic so he just dismisses everybody who uses it as being incomprehensible. I’m not familiar with people who are not familiar with critical thinking. I don’t know how to deal with it.</p>
<p>I can’t believe you guys have so much time to waste writing essay response to some dumb argument. </p>
<p>Wow get a life.</p>
<p>Though I did only skim this so far, I did manage to pick up on Itachirumon’s growing love for PaulandArt. Something magical and/or slightly unsettling is being witnessed.</p>
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<p>Can I raise an objection to this? This seems like a heated discussion and I don’t mean to interfere if this is going down between specific people, but I personally would raise an objection to this. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t necessarily question the comparative difficulty of finding answers to questions with no right answer versus solving a problem with governing equations. Both are arduous processes in real life, but taxing in very difficult ways. People will spend their lives trying to find answers to both kind of questions and never succeed. But in the context of college courses, I feel the nature of these isn’t quite the same. In my experience*, I find it quite a bit easier when more abstract concepts and questions are to be answered in a paper or assignment for the very reason that there is no one right answer. There may not be any right answer at all, but there a lot of things you can argue. When posed with questions about the writer’s underlying meaning in a play in my theatre history class or having to write a paper about consciousness and existence for my philosophy class, I know that as long as I have a well-supported and logical argument that I cannot necessarily be wrong. If I have supported myself and provided a valid argument, I will almost definitely receive a good grade. As may another person in the class who had a completely viewpoint.</p>
<p>In a technical class, however, I must never make a mistake. There is only one right solution, and I am incorrect and do not receive credit if I do not find it. In my experience* this is a lot more difficult to do. I find the leeway given in humanities much less arduous.</p>
<p>*But of course, this is my experience, and a sample size of one is proof of nothing. And really, I don’t mean to prove anything. I only mean to contribute my views to the discussion.</p>
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<p>I don’t think humanities are about finding answers to questions with no right answer.</p>
<p>Surely nobody’s stupid enough to try to do something they literally know to be impossible.</p>
<p>of course, in a humanities setting, constructing and upholding an argument and using primary sources/evidence to support it is quite difficult. typically, unless the prompt for the paper is “what are your personal feelings about x” (which has never happened for me) you have to have some sort of rhetorical skill, which is easier to sharpen for some than for others.</p>
<p>note: NOT saying that it’s more difficult/less difficult/as difficult as solving problems with concrete answers. (i.e. i’m not arguing so don’t attack me). i’m just saying that it’s not as simple as dumping out words on a page and then getting a grade based on effort. besides, we shouldn’t judge the actual difficulty of a subject based on how easy it is to earn a certain grade, that defeats the purpose of the argument.</p>
<p>braden -</p>
<p>I think you and I are saying exactly the same thing. I meant that humanities major tend to receive lower scores on science/math tests than do science majors on, say, an English paper - but not because one discipline is more challenging than the other, but because that’s how the classes are designed. As both you and I have noticed, there is only one right answer to a math question whereas an argument or a case could be made for basically anything you write in a paper.</p>
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<p>Depends on what the argument is. I would guess that a lot more people start out in science and get bad grades before switching to humanities or social studies so that they can graduate than the other way around. </p>
<p>The idea of a hierarchy of majors is useless without some type of definition. General difficulty seems like one reasonable definition. Or general earning potential. Or the general level of specialized skill one acquires. Or the general level of intelligence of the students in the major. Whatever.</p>
<p>The reason these threads are stupid is that there’s never a single definition everyone’s arguing on, so you just get these pointless circles.</p>
<p>powerbomb - Pretty much what I was saying, yes, we are in agreement. I’m sorry if I misunderstood your point… A little confused though, as you seemed to be saying previously that people in sciences would not fare well outside their field:</p>
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<p>And now you’re saying that “humanities major tend to receive lower scores on science/math tests than do science majors on, say, an English paper”.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to be confrontational, I’m just explaining why I thought you were saying something quite different.</p>
<p>I’m not entirely in disagreement, by the way, that students in disciplines such as engineering can tend to be bad writers. However, this thread seemed to have become caught in an endless loop of counterexamples. It is difficult to compare technical/science students at a lower tier institution to students at one such as Harvard (as one poster brought up) as naturally Harvard will attempt to bring in more well-rounded students. Not well-rounded students exist, and unsurprisingly, they will gravitate to whatever they are good at. So students who do not excel at humanities will lean towards fields such as science, and students who do not excel at or enjoy sciences will end up in subjects such as the humanities. This has the effect of likely skewing the average science student as slightly worse at humanities and the average humanities student at slightly worse at science in a way that makes perfect sense.</p>
<p>braden:</p>
<p>The point of these humanities classes is, indeed, to teach skills of critical thinking, analysis and high-level reading comprehension. There may be more than one right answer to the question, but there is only one way to write the answer: a logical, clearly-supported argument based upon valid conclusions drawn from textual or data analysis of reliable sources.</p>
<p>As this thread has shown, the ability to make that kind of argument is far from universal.</p>
<p>Also, though there is usually more than one right answer, that does not mean there are no wrong answers. Someone who wrote a paper claiming that the Germans, not the Japanese, attacked Pearl Harbor would, I suspect, have a hard time providing evidence for that claim.</p>
<p>polarscribe -
I tried to be very clear that I did not mean one could simply make any argument. When I said this:
I made sure to say a well-supported and logical argument. I meant this to imply the requirement of support from conclusions based on reliable sources, as well as that the argument must be logical and clearly written. If I gave the impression anywhere that I was claiming one could write a paper on the Germans being the ones who attacked Pearl Harbour and receive a good grade, I apologize for the lack of clarity. I thought such a paper could not fall under the category of well-supported, and thus believed I had such things covered.</p>
<p>I also do not argue that it is trivial to write a paper that fulfills these requirements. Indeed, comprehension, analysis, and argument are skills that are by no means easy to master. But an engineering education also demands equal challenges in comprehension, analysis critical thinking and problemsolving, merely in a different manner. The challenges are not analyzing a text and writing a paper, but instead analyzing a physical problem and designing a solution. The paper must be well-argued and comprehensible, and the presentation or writeup of an engineering solution must similarly be logically laid out and organized. In that sense, I don’t feel one can necessarily say the skillset required by one field is more demanding than the other. But I still propose that the humanities offers a great deal more leeway in what is considered “correct” than technical studies or sciences. </p>
<p>That is what I meant to communicate - that answering problems with no concrete “correct” answer is often easier for me than answering problems with only one solution. I did not mean to imply anything about the skills involved with either, as they are not easy to compare.</p>
<p>EDIT: Should have this on the same page. I didn’t notice I had mixed up powerbomb and PaulandArt in a post above until I the time to edit it had already run out. I apologize for this mistake, the post is totally useless.</p>
<p>Damnit, I wish I could edit my previous post. I GOT POWERBOMB AND PAULANDART MIXED UP IN MY ABOVE POST. SORRY!</p>
<p>Guess I should retire from posting for tonight, I’m obviously not with it enough.</p>