<p>how easy are majors like sociology? When people tell you to take easy courses in college or major in something easy (so that you can have a high gpa for professional school , does it mean that it requires no work to make an A in the class.</p>
<p>If you are attending a highly-ranked liberal arts college or university, you will have to put a tremendous amount of work into whatever major you decide upon. Although in the context of one school, one major could be comparatively easier to another, i.e.: physics compared to sociology.</p>
<p>I doubt you can slack off completely in any major and get an easy A, especially if you go to a rigorous LAC or university. However, some majors are easier in comparison to other majors. Majors like History and Sociology have fewer required classes than Engineering or Physics, and Science majors generally have lower GPA’s. Assuming that the average person in Sociology is just as intelligent as the average person in Physics (some would argue this, but let’s assume for the sake of argument) the lower GPA means that the classes are more difficult in the Physics major.</p>
<p>Difficulty of major also depends on college. Here at NYU, Business is considered very difficult and our B-school is the most elite school on campus. In many colleges, Business is considered an easy major though.</p>
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<p>I would say this is backwards. For the most part, it’s the major and the student that determine difficulty. Majors are extraordinarily diverse in their rigor, and this of course can only be evaluated in light of the particular skills and disposition of the student in question. The level of school also influences difficulty, but I think that’s a more minor factor. </p>
<p>In terms of difficulty of major, it’s more apt to compare state university math students with ivy math students and state university sociology students with ivy sociology students than it is to pre-sort by school.</p>
<p>I think what constitutes an “easy” major is pretty relative.</p>
<p>I took a sociology class as an “easy” gened…boy was I wrong, I worked just as hard in that class as my higher level stats classes…don’t be fooled</p>
<p>depends what is ‘easy’ for you- would you rather write weekly 20 page papers? or have multiple labs/problem sets?</p>
<p>I can BS essays, I can cram for finals.</p>
<p>But when it comes to computer science projects… there’s no mercy.</p>
<p>I disagree with all majors being equally rigorous. In my Intro Humanities classes, there were no 20 page papers per week, the class met twice a week, and there were no curves so everyone could (potentially) get an A if they’re smart. In my Intro Science courses, cutthroat preMeds are competing for A’s and there’s a curve. The class entails a lecture, recitation, and lab, so it met 5 times a week and there was more work involved. So at the Intro level, some classes were easier in my experience.</p>
<p>At the upperclassmen 300-level, it’s more comparable. That’s when the 20 pg papers come in and so forth. However, some majors are more rigorous than others. Think about it - let’s say students are equally intelligent across all majors. Then we’d expect the average GPA to be the same, but it’s not. Even if Engineering students and Psych students are equally intelligent, one group has a lower average GPA, meaning it’s a more rigorous major.</p>
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So incredibly true…</p>
<p>There are classes that require less work than others, classes whose material is easier than others, and professors who grade easier than others.</p>
<p>This last semester I took a Natural Hazards class that required 3 hours of homework a week and 4 hours worth of studying for each of three exams. That was an easy class compared to the classes for my major. An example of an easy professor would be a certain philosophy professor at Haverford who starts everyone in the class out with a 3.7. Reasons for lowering that grade include not signing the class attendance sheet and handing in 3 pages instead of 5 for the final paper (which is probably the only assignment for the course). Not surprisingly, there is a HUGE waitlist for each of his classes.</p>
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I think that’s actually a pretty major factor. There is already a very notable difference between Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore, and all of these college would be considered very selective. Then there is this math graduate student at Bryn Mawr who graduated summa cum laude and with departmental honors in math from a less selective college. She had already taken analysis and algebra at her old college, but she decided to retake those classes at Bryn Mawr (the undergraduate version, not the graduate one). Well, she only took those two classes along with a non-credit language class for her language exam, and she felt overwhelmed by the work. Mind you, our undergraduate students take 4-5 classes a semester and most of them have not seen the material before. Oh, and the same classes at Haverford move at twice the speed and assign more homework.</p>
<p>It depends on the talent pool. This is how it is at my university…</p>
<p>There are tons of liberal arts majors that are serious students, but they also compete against a bunch of slackers who are just trying to get by. </p>
<p>There are also tons of math/physics/engineering majors that are serious, but the slackers in those classes are also more often than not savants that crush the curve. Not to mention these classes give out fewer top grades to begin with (you can check this at your school’s registrar).</p>
<p>Clearly this can differ by school, especially in the case of business students. My uni has a top business school that is really hard to get into, but once you’re in its difficult not to have a great GPA (except for accounting of course).</p>
<p>Easy major or not, how many people make an a in the class like if there were 20 kids in the class how many would make an a? I hear that an a is nearly impossible unless you are really smart, good at being good toward your teacher or taking easy courses. How difficult is it to get an a at a top 25 liberal arts college. Is there a lot of presentations? Lac do have higher average gps such as a 3.4. Does this mean most people make at least a b?</p>
<p>Please help</p>
<p>Is recitation in premed courses an essay, multiple choice, or oral</p>
<p>it doesn’t mean no work… it means easy work. i’ve always gotten As in my humanities classes and they took some work, but it was always easy work. i’d say it’s somewhat easier to fill out russian worksheets than it is to implement your own efficient malloc and free (and realloc). but still, i don’t think CS projects are hard enough to dread them… i can only remember one time i started one more than 2 days in advance and i’ve still done well on the vast majority of them.</p>
<p>as far as “is science really harder???”, yes, it is. everyone’s seen those science/math for humanities majors classes… where are the humanities for science majors classes?</p>
<p>to answer your question, if someone told me to take a class because it was easy, i would probably figure it either has a bunch of really easy work and nothing that really makes me even think much to get an easy A, or that you just have to go to lecture and take notes and have a couple take-home exams. and also taking math/science classes as a sophomore or later that are basically all-freshmen classes i consider pretty easy (or taking them as a freshmen if you have good study habits…). eg, data structures, calc1/2, discrete math.</p>
<p>I majored in History of Art at Bryn Mawr and then got my MBA with Distinction (graduating top 10%) at NYU Stern. For me, business school was a breeze compared to college. Honestly.</p>
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<p>Really? I find that odd. Because at my school, after you get past intro CS, nobody gets a good grade on a project if you start only two days prior. At least, I’ve never met somebody so ingenious he can avoid tens of hours worth of debugging when implementing the program.</p>
<p>Last semester I was required to implement a trie dictionary, and then use that to implement a multi-bit LZW compression program. It was one of the easier assignments, and I would be rather impressed if anybody manages to rock this assignment with only two days to do it. And that’s not even getting into the map-reduce implementation we had to do later.</p>
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<p>all the java/data structures projects i’ve done were pieces of cake, pretty much the night before projects… except tetris I guess cause that took a million years to get all the graphics and details done right (and that was just intro java first semester stuff). as far as comp. org., as far as i’m concerned, they’re not necessarily easy projects… they make you think, yeah, but they’re not actually that difficult. they’re all reasonable projects for undergrad students. they’re intended to be pretty doable in a decent time window as long as you know what’s up. we had to do a malloc project, a couple projects with assembly, optimize some code to rotate/smooth images based on our knowledge of how memory/caches work, etc.</p>
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<p>I don’t think you’ve gotten to the meat yet. My professors have me us concurrency and server-based projects that literally takes days to debug. </p>
<p>The most time consuming project I had involved designing a server-based game, and then writing the bot for that game… and half the grade involved creating a bot that could beat the TA’s bots. I don’t care who you are, you’re not not going to crack that in 2 days. The sheer amount of debugging needed is astronomical.</p>
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<p>The grad students I work with often complain about spending 3-4 all nighters with our undergrad computer architecture course projects. Sounds hard enough to me.</p>