That wasn’t my point, unless you witnessed those comparisons in the MIT forum, with MIT alumni/posters regularly comparing the rigor of their core to other colleges. Regardless of who actually has the more rigorous core, such discussions seem to brought up far more of in the Chicago forum than an any other college forum, including within the forums of other colleges that also have a rigorous core. MIT probably has a more rigorous core than both Chicago and Harvard, yet I can’t recall ever seeing a thread in the MIT forum in which MIT aficionados compare their core rigor to Chicago/Harvard.
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Is it ever not the case?
(other than in cases of abandonment or extreme parental neglect - and even then)
It’s always the case. But if you ask many parents they will insist that their young children, by their own volition, just happen to wander over to the Russian School of Mathematics two suburbs over for 4 hrs on Sat/Sun, and the parents have nothing to do with it.
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Or that their four year old picked up a violin and said “Mommy, what’s a concerto and how do I learn to play one?”
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…or learned to read
Yes, where are all those peep from the liberal arts thread who thought so highly of core curriculums?
…not to go religious or philosophical on y’all, but hey, Marlowe started it, so here goes.
There is a biblical line (Ex 24:7) that is usually translated as “All that the Lord has declared will we do, and be obedient”, but as is translations’ wont (the aforementioned ones of Shakespeare’s sonnets notwithstanding;) it misses a whole layer of meaning.
Another possible translation of the same verse is “…we will do, and we will understand”, which, in its essence, is the concept of learning by doing. To understand, to internalize, the importance of many things you have to first start doing them.
Be it math, reading, or playing the violin, doing precedes understanding.
And with that understanding comes freedom, which Spinoza saw as necessity understood.
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I also believe students in STEM need exposures to the humanities, and vice versa.
On the other hand (trying to be a bit more provocative), there isn’t a complete symmetry between the humanities and STEM. In the most profound subjects in STEM, because of their depth and hierarchical nature, a student needs to devote much more completely just to possibly understand them (let alone making contributions) in sufficient depth to be useful. How to balance breadth and depth is an issue for all colleges and their students.
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Why should “complete symmetry” be the goal? How would this “complete symmetry” be measured and what purpose would be served? What in English Literature would be “completely symmetrical” with, say, multivariable calculus? Is it just a tit for tat? Or is a broader educational and societal purpose being served?
Symmetry isn’t a goal. The symmetry here (or the lack thereof) refers to required efforts.
What does that even mean? Is it just another phrase for the much vaunted “rigor?” Why should there be symmetry of “required efforts?”
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The lack of symmetry in required efforts is a fact, not something to be remedied. I know this is the UChicago forum, but since Caltech has been mentioned upthread a number of times, I’ll use it as an example. Before it went test blind, its students (and applicants) had had the the highest test scores (by a significant margin) among all colleges for many decades. As you probably guessed, verbal portion of the scores (once they exceeded certain minimum) were never as important to Caltech. However, its students also had the highest verbal scores, even though these students were all much more focused on STEM. Their high verbal scores were incidental, often with little comparable effort. More generally, among test scorers with highly asymmetric component scores, most of them tend to have lower math scores than their verbal scores, even though the math portion of SAT has always been considered trivial relative to the verbal portion by high scorers.
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Not sure this is true, but assuming it is true, so what?
As for the rest, I don’t follow, and I think that is probably because the SAT verbal scores of CalTech students don’t tell us what you think they tell us.
That they can read?
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If that’s the test indicates, I guess we know why CalTech no longer requires it.
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In 2019, 2 colleges were tied for the highest average verbal standardized test scores – Caltech and MIT. Both had the same average 25th/75th SAT and ACT in the verbal section. There was not a large gap between MIT/Caltech and other schools. Instead many schools all have very similar verbal scores. For example Duke and Rice averaged 5 points lower on CR SAT than Caltech/MIT. Harvey Mudd had the same English ACT as Caltech/MIT, but slightly lower SAT. In some previous years, a different college surpassed Caltech.
More relevant to the thread, Chicago was also tied with Caltech and MIT in verbal SAT, but fell a little lower in ACT. Chicago has a unique history of having asymmetrical SAT and ACT scores, which may relate to preferred admission groups being correlated with states where SAT/ACT is more/less dominant.
Math scores showed a larger difference. Caltech’s 25/75 math range was 790-800. For kids at the MIT/Caltech level, this test is largely measuring if they can answer simple, multiple choice algebra/trig type questions rapidly without making careless errors. It seems that most Caltech students are able to do so without any careless errors.
I’ve never seen specific numbers, but I am skeptical about students with lopsided scores typically having lower math. I expect that there a good portion of kids who speak English as a 2nd language, yet stil take the test in English. Such kids may ace the math section and do poorly in the English section. This is particularly common among GRE scores for grad students. Some studies reviewing performance of PhD students show a significant portion of PhD students who score the maximum on math and near minimum on verbal.
I was in this lopsided score group when I was a HS student. I always scored the maximum on any standardized test related to math, science, logic, analysis, or similar. However, I only scored a 500 on verbal due to a weak vocabulary, so I had a 300 point gap. After more vocabulary exposure during college, I did much better on verbal GRE, scoring 90 something percentile.
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Perhaps CC should. 
I confess, I didn’t read your entire post. Between the pressure of work and the hurry of it, I probably only read the first few sentences.Usually in essays, the first few introductory sentences give away the direction of the remainder of the prose, but that isn’t always the case, and I just allow fir a departure from such structure in this informal public forum. I assumed, and that fails sometimes.
I thought you meant that MIT is known to be harder than UChicago, and i only meant to convey that which i have gleaned from these hallowed anecdotal halls: that both have been mentioned aplenty whenever folks are talking about rigorous schools.
I might have further explained that, due to the genius-level Math/Physics/Engineering stuff going on at MIT, similar to Caltech – world-enhancing advancements – and give. the pace at which those things are taught – well, duh, of course the rigor is stout. It’s Good Will Hunting stuff.
But UChicago’s rigor is a bit different: their method is neither limited by major nor pursuit: everything is debated, bled dry, ground to intellectual dust. If UChicago had a basket-weaving major. the intro class would be spent arguing the need for baskets. You wouldn’t touch twine or fibrous reed till the 200-level courses. Someone woukd write a 20-page paper about how Robert Frost would make baskets. based on his poetry. Someone else.would write a paper imaging solzhenitsyn’s thoughts on baskets, and whether that would have mitigated or exacerbated his plight in Soviet Russia.
If there were a candy cane-making class at UChicago, every student would suffer vertigo.
I hope you get what i’m saying:
MIt is hard because they are probably the pre-eminent math/engineering school in the world (with Caltech…), and everyone there has to take advanced and fast-paced math classes, and that per se is hard.
UChicago – everything is hard, because they have decided that no stone will remain unturned in every path they teach. It’s in the mores of the place.Those kids don’t pass out from too much liquor; they pass out from too much scholarly debate.
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So what? Unlike their STEM counterparts, too many students in the humanities, even at the most elite colleges, lack the similar capacity to study and understand STEM in any depth, which may explain why some of them have all sorts of misconceptions about STEM.
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I remember my D talking about her introductory honors math class, where one class was spent discussing what a number is.
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