<p>I don't see what tenure has to do with it. The engineering department chairs are tenured too, but that doesn't stop them from making their programs ridiculously hard.</p>
<p>I don't think the grading differential makes that much difference, because graduate schools and many employers are aware of it and factor it in. I got into top MBA programs with a pretty low undergrad engineering GPA.</p>
<p>The hardest class I've had my first two years at Cal was Comp Lit 1A, I've never worked as hard for a C. The easiest was Phys 7A, the final grade was set as the highest between your weighed class grade and the grade of the final exam. I got an A- on my final and that ended up being my class grade.</p>
<p>The concept of a major's difficulty is pretty subjective. A lot of engineers are pretty skilled at the scientific structure of the coursework but very uncomfortable at the open-ended essay-based approach in a lot of social science classes, and vice versa.</p>
<p>The one variable that is more objective is the workload differential between majors, and there architecture and CS are near the top of the scale.</p>
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The hardest class I've had my first two years at Cal was Comp Lit 1A, I've never worked as hard for a C.
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<p>Yeah, and how about your last two years at Cal? </p>
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The concept of a major's difficulty is pretty subjective. A lot of engineers are pretty skilled at the scientific structure of the coursework but very uncomfortable at the open-ended essay-based approach in a lot of social science classes, and vice versa.
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<p>Yet numerous national studies attest to the extremely high rates of attrition in engineering (and natural science) majors, something for which there is no comparison in the humanities and many social science majors. </p>
<p>One can also consider what Berkeley's own undergraduate colloqiuum found.</p>
<p>"The physical sciences and engineering had rigorous grading standards roughly in line with the recommendations from 1976," stated Rine, "while the humanities and social sciences in many classes had all but given up on grades below a B, and in many courses below an A-"</p>
<p>Undergraduate</a> Education Colloquium, The College of Letters and Science, UC Berkeley</p>
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I don't think the grading differential makes that much difference, because graduate schools and many employers are aware of it and factor it in. I got into top MBA programs with a pretty low undergrad engineering GPA.
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<p>Yeah, because MBA programs don't place a high emphasis on grades, instead keying on work experience. Law and medicine, as I'm sure you know, are quite different. </p>
<p>Besides, if you are right, and grading differentials don't make much of a difference anyway, then there is no reason not to change them to make them more aligned with each other. After all, if grad schools and employers really do factor in the GPA differentials as you assert, then they would be able to change them again in the face of a new grading scheme. </p>
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The one variable that is more objective is the workload differential between majors, and there architecture and CS are near the top of the scale.
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<p>And that just begs the question - why? Specifically, why don't the 'gut' majors simply assign more work, and then give failing grades to those students who don't do the extra work? There seems to be no reason not to do this; that is, unless one wants to defend student laziness. After all, if it's good for the engineering students to have to learn how to work hard, then it should also be good for all of the other students to also have to learn how to work hard.</p>
<p>Part of it is personal aptitude. It took me a whole weekend to write a 5-page literature paper, while somewhat who was a more skilled and prolific writer could churn it out in a couple of hours. As well, some students can read a 300p book in a day while others need half a week to do it.</p>
<p>Similarly, I would "get" Phys 7A-B after doing a few problem sets in a couple of hours, while others would have to read the chapter page to page, attend section and/or go to office hours.</p>
<p>I think it's also true that most Americans have a hard time with maths and sciences, it's partly a cultural issue. Many European countries like France or Russia have far more rigourous approaches to maths, which are drilled in students at an early age. </p>
<p>As far as the most time-consuming majors, it's not just a question of assigning more work, it's just that those majors are by nature more time-intensive. Debugging programs or building scale models takes a lot of time.</p>
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Part of it is personal aptitude. It took me a whole weekend to write a 5-page literature paper, while somewhat who was a more skilled and prolific writer could churn it out in a couple of hours. As well, some students can read a 300p book in a day while others need half a week to do it.</p>
<p>Similarly, I would "get" Phys 7A-B after doing a few problem sets in a couple of hours, while others would have to read the chapter page to page, attend section and/or go to office hours.
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<p>Yet I think you would agree (and in fact you already had), that certain majors simply assign far more work than do others. Why? </p>
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I think it's also true that most Americans have a hard time with maths and sciences, it's partly a cultural issue. Many European countries like France or Russia have far more rigourous approaches to maths, which are drilled in students at an early age.
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<p>I'm afraid I don't buy it, simply because the differences have been shown to be cross-national. For example, in many Asian countries the primary educational system is extremely rigorous, particularly in the sciences and in math, yet a distinct difference in difficulty still exists among the college technical vs. non-technical majors in those countries. For example, in Taiwan, the engineering majors (especially EE) are generally viewed as the harshest courses of study available in colleges in Taiwan, and the non-technical, humanities-style majors are generally derided as 'soft' majors for the lazy and incompetent, in which you don't really have to work that hard or know that much in order to complete the program. Similarly, in the universities in Hong Kong, those students who end up majoring in the humanities (like Chinese) are viewed as the weaker students who simply weren't good enough to major in a technical subject. Whether that view is fair or not fair, that is what happens in those countries. </p>
<p>But again, the question is why? Why should this divide exist worldwide? Or, perhaps even more importantly, even if the divide does exist worldwide, why does it need to exist at Berkeley too? After all, just because somebody else does something wrong doesn't mean that you should also do something wrong. </p>
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As far as the most time-consuming majors, it's not just a question of assigning more work, it's just that those majors are by nature more time-intensive. Debugging programs or building scale models takes a lot of time.
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<p>I profoundly disagree that certain majors are simply less time-intensive "by nature". It has nothing to do with 'their nature', it is simply a matter of the arbitrarily low expectations that have been placed upon them by their administrators. They could easily demand far far more work from the students. They just don't.</p>
<p>As a case in point, just consider how hard it is to get a humanities PhD. You have to complete a tremendous amount of work. You can't just throw together some half-assed dissertation and then expect to graduate. People spend years, sometimes over a decade, writing their dissertation, and even then, a significant chunk of them will never successfully complete it. Nor are they simply lolly-gagging around while they're writing it; they have to work like dogs in order to get it done.</p>
<p>Now, don't get me wrong. I am not saying that the humanities undergrads should be required to work as hard as the PhD students. I'm not a sadist. I am simply saying that the humanities undergrads can be required to work far harder than they do now, and that there is nothing inherently less time-consuming about a humanities discipline, as the PhD students can surely attest to. If these disciplines can demand a fiendish amount of work from the PhD students, they can surely demand more work from the undergrads than what they are demanding now. That they currently don't is simply an arbitrary choice.</p>
<p>I don’t know but I think she might have meant classes with most coarse work. That to me would have been a more reasonable question. </p>
<p>I heard in college, philosophy is a lot of reading and writing which umm… I HATE and would flunk the moment I look at the professor. On the other hand I am very good at history, so I would agree with sakky and the rest it depends on the person.</p>
<p>girl_ski, you do know that history "is a lot of reading and writing," as well, right?</p>
<p>oh crap!!!! but I still love it, I guess I have to live with it >_<</p>
<p>To say that academics worldwide "arbitrarily chose" to assign more work to its science students seems silly to me. Admittedly a meticulous reader, I felt my philosophy class demanded far more work than my physics class last semester. </p>
<p>But physics was more stressful, given the grading curve. I'm inclined to believe this is why most students think the hard sciences are more difficult.</p>
<p>Why aren't humanities students graded as harshly as science students? My theory is, it's a lot easier to come up with wrong answers in math and science, which generally arise whenever improper methods are used. But in the humanities, especially at the college level, truth and falsity are vague concepts. Who's to say an interpretation or argument, as outlandish as it may be, is necessarily wrong? How does one properly evaluate a literary or artistic piece?</p>
<p>Simply put, I think instructors in the humanities tend to grade their students more generously because it's much harder to fail them.</p>
<p>Kultur, it seems that you did good philosophy. I , however, hear that the major for microbial biology is easy. :)</p>
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To say that academics worldwide "arbitrarily chose" to assign more work to its science students seems silly to me. Admittedly a meticulous reader, I felt my philosophy class demanded far more work than my physics class last semester.</p>
<p>But physics was more stressful, given the grading curve. I'm inclined to believe this is why most students think the hard sciences are more difficult.
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<p>I think you answered your concern in the first paragraph with your second paragraph. You said it yourself - the physics grade curve was harsher. But what that means is that philosophy probably was easier than physics. After all, the point is not simply about how much work is assigned. That doesn't really matter. What really matters is what happens to you if you don't do the assigned work. A class can assign all the work in the world, but if you can get a good grade (or at least pass) even if you do very little of the work, then the class isn't really that hard. In other words, what really counts isn't how much work is assigned, but rather how much work is necessary to pass. I would contend that the technical majors are harder in this regard.</p>
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Why aren't humanities students graded as harshly as science students? My theory is, it's a lot easier to come up with wrong answers in math and science, which generally arise whenever improper methods are used. But in the humanities, especially at the college level, truth and falsity are vague concepts. Who's to say an interpretation or argument, as outlandish as it may be, is necessarily wrong? How does one properly evaluate a literary or artistic piece?
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<p>I've heard this argument before, and I'm afraid I don't buy it, and I will again invoke the example of the humanities PhD's. </p>
<p>Let's walk through an example. Let's say that you want to get a PhD in one of the humanities. Well, you can't just dash off any old piece of literary or artistic work and then simply expect to be handed your PhD. If your dissertation committee doesn't think that your work isn't of the highest quality (according to their definition of 'quality') then they are simply not going to pass you. You can argue to them all you want about how one can't say that your literary work is 'wrong', and they're not going to hear it. If you don't meet their standard of quality, you are not going to graduate. That is why people take years, sometimes over a decade, to complete a humanities PhD. Many of them never manage to pass.</p>
<p>What that shows is that you can evaluate artistic/literary works. Humanities professors do it all the time in the way that they judge their PhD students. So if they can do that, why can't they do it with their undergrads too? Again, don't get me wrong, I am obviously not saying that undergrads should be held to the same standards as the PhD students are. I am simply saying that they can be held to higher standards than they are today.</p>
<p>Easiest: Basket Weaving
Hardest: Underwater Basket Weaving</p>
<p>I heard the math major is challenging but from my knowlege everything is hard this BERKELEY !_!</p>
<p>@sakky:
Humanities undergrad departments do not have the resources to carry out a higher standard whereas science and engineering do in additional to the fact that grading scantrons or fill-in-the-blanks is much easier than grading double-digit-page essays.</p>
<p>This leads to a vicious cycle becasue students tend to take the path of least resistance.</p>
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Humanities undergrad departments do not have the resources to carry out a higher standard whereas science and engineering do in additional to the fact that grading scantrons or fill-in-the-blanks is much easier than grading double-digit-page essays.
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<p>Actually, I think it would be quite simple. Use the same grade curves that the science/engineering majors do. For example, if only 20% (or whatever the percentage is) of the grades in the science/engineering classes are A's, then only 20% of the grades in the humanities classes should be A's. </p>
<p>Now, I know what you're thinking: that would just make the grading in the humanities classes arbitrary, for who's to say that only 20% of the students in a humanities class deserve A's, right? But the same logic is true of the science/engineering classes. After all, I could just as easily ask why only 20% of the science/engineering students deserve A's. Why not 50%? Why not 75%? The 20% figure is arbitrary whether it's applied to humanities or to sci/eng. Yet everybody seems to have accepted that figure for the sci/eng students. So why wouldn't they be able to accept it for the humanities students too? </p>
<p>{Actually, come to think of it, I don't really want this proposal at all. Instead, what I really want is for the sci/eng classes to use the curve of the humanities. For example, if 50% of the grades in the humanities classes are A's, then 50% of the grades in sci/eng should also be A's. If the humanities majors don't weed, then the sci/eng majors should also not weed. But the salient point is, what's fair is fair. We should not be having such large grading disparities among majors.}</p>
<p>Adopting a tight curve would make the grading in humanities classes arbitrary because it's just harder to develop assignments/tests that yield statistically meaningful grade distribution. If the top 50% of the class have statistically equivalent scores, imposing a 25% A-curve would mean heads for A's and tails for B's.</p>
<p>I'm afraid I don't know enough about humanities Ph.Ds to contest your argument, though you're wise to point out that Ph.D standards can never realistically apply to literally thousands of undergraduates. Perhaps that's the issue; again, it's much easier and considerably less time consuming to evaluate a physics worksheet than a philosophy paper.</p>
<p>Personally, I prefer the harsh grading policies of science and engineering. Sure, I don't always benefit from them, but it compels me to work harder, which may be why these programs are noticeably better than others at Berkeley. Furthermore, it curbs grade inflation, a huge problem at many universities including Cal.</p>
<p>I guess I'm sort of arguing for both sides. :)</p>
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Adopting a tight curve would make the grading in humanities classes arbitrary because it's just harder to develop assignments/tests that yield statistically meaningful grade distribution. If the top 50% of the class have statistically equivalent scores, imposing a 25% A-curve would mean heads for A's and tails for B's
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<p>So? Like I said, that's what happens in science/engineering. I would argue that the grading there is arbitrary too. </p>
<p>Let me give you some examples. In one particular physics exam, a question was asked whose entire answer was based off one particular equation in the book. If you just happened to have luckily written that equation on the sheet that you were allowed to bring in, then you got full points. If you didn't, then too bad, you got at best partial credit. Since there were only 5 question on the entire exam, then having that equation on your sheet was basically worth the difference of a full letter grade. However, this equation was merely one among hundreds in the book, and there was nothing seemingly remarkable about that equation (i.e. it was never mentioned in lecture or the notes). Hence, only a few people actually chose to include that equation on their sheet, hence they were the only people who got that question completely right and hence ended up with better grades than everybody else. I would argue that that's completely arbitrary. </p>
<p>Here's another. One math professor ran a exam grading policy where he would provide partial credit to somebody who who wrote down the correct steps necessary to solve a question but didn't actually completely solve that question, but would actually provide zero credit if you actually tried to solve it but then made a computational mistake and got the final answer wrong, his reasoning being that anybody can then make a computational error to make his final answer match (for example, you can make a mistake such that your final equation becomes 0=0). The problem is that he didn't tell anybody that this was his grading policy. Hence, many students first wrote down what they would do, and then actually tried to compute it but do so wrongly, and hence get zero's on those exam questions, whereas if they hadn't even tried to compute the final answer at all, but just stopped after they had written the steps, they would have gotten partial credit on those questions. I would argue that that's arbitrary. </p>
<p>In fact, the entire notion of partial credit is arbitrary. It has been said in this thread that science and engineering questions have right/wrong answers. The problem, as I'm sure that most science/engineering students will tell you, is that, on the exams, few if any students will actually be able to compute all of the right answers all the way to completion. A typical science/engineering exam is about 3-5 questions, each one * of which would probably take the *entire exam period to carefully compute all the way to completion. Clearly you don't have time to do that for the entire exam. Perfect scores are practically unheard. Everybody is living off partial credit. </p>
<p>But think about what that means. Which steps are worth partial credit, and which steps aren't? How many partial points should be assigned to each step? That's arbitrary. For example, let's take a 20 point question. One professor might decide that it can be solved in a series of 10 discrete steps, each one worth 2 points each. However, another prof might decide that actually only 3 discrete steps exist, and the first step is the most important one, so the first step is worth 10 points, and the rest are worth 5 each. But the point is, it's arbitrary. Furthermore, as a student, you don't know what the steps are (obviously because if they actually told you the steps, that would tell you how to solve the question). Hence, when you write down all of the steps, you don't actually know how much partial credit you got. Maybe you got most of the points. Maybe you only got a few. It's arbitrary.</p>
<p>The point is, you need to disabuse yourself of the notion that science/eng have clearcut grading. They do not. The grading is arbitrary there too. Yet that doesn't stop sci/eng from holding rough grade curves. Hence, you basically end up with the same "random coin-flipping" that determines grading in science/eng that you do in humanities. </p>
<p>Hence, both worlds have to put up with arbitrary grading. The difference, again, are the letter-grade curves. </p>
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I'm afraid I don't know enough about humanities Ph.Ds to contest your argument, though you're wise to point out that Ph.D standards can never realistically apply to literally thousands of undergraduates.
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<p>I was simply using PhD committees as examples that show that you can impose tough standards on disciplines that are supposedly difficult to judge. </p>
<p>Besides, this opens the door to yet another possibility. You guys say that it's impossible to apply tough standards to humanities undergrads. Fine, let's say that's true. But then that begs the question of why we automatically assume that humanities undergrad work is automatically good. Why don't we just assume it is automatically bad? </p>
<p>Here's what I mean. As said above, right now, the difference in undergrad humanities grading is often times between an A or a B (or very rarely a C). The philosophy seems to be that since you can't really tell who's work is good, then you give the students the benefit of the doubt; you generally give everybody a pretty good grade unless the work is clearly so egregiously terrible that it deserves a terrible grade. The assumption therefore is biased towards good grades.</p>
<p>But why is the bias towards good grades? Why can't the assumption be biased towards bad grades? For example, I could just as easily say that since I can't really tell whether the work is good or not, I am going to simply assume that the work is bad unless the work is clearly so good that it deserves a good grade. Hence, I will simply give everybody a C or worse unless I am so impressed by a particular work that maybe I'll give a B, or in rare circumstances, an A. Why can't I do this? There's no reason why I have to give the students the benefit of the doubt. </p>
<p>Lest anybody think this is an unusually harsh and punitive grading philosophy, hey man, sci/eng students have been putting up with this sort of weeder grading for decades and nobody's crying for them. {Ok, well, nobody except me.} If they should have to put up with it, then humanities students should put up with it too. Otherwise, nobody should have to put up with it. </p>
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Personally, I prefer the harsh grading policies of science and engineering. Sure, I don't always benefit from them, but it compels me to work harder, which may be why these programs are noticeably better than others at Berkeley. Furthermore, it curbs grade inflation, a huge problem at many universities including Cal.
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<p>If you really want to quell the grade inflation, then it seems to me that tackling the problems in the humanities would be the first priority, because that's where the grade inflation is most endemic.</p>
<p>I think all of the majors at Cal are pretty easy.</p>