OK, there are core general education classes. But you know what? They’re science classes “for non-science majors”. That is usually mentioned in the coursebooks. And the difference in depth, difficulty, and sheer mass of information is stark.

FYI, there are also plenty of colleges which offer arts/humanities/social-science courses for science/engineer majors with mostly multiple choice/fill in the blank exams, light reading loads(Less than 300-500 pages/week) using textbooks/readings which would be considered far below the standards of my public high school, 3-10 page papers over the entire semester, and/or emphasis on scientific and technical subject matter (i.e. History of Computers).

Some of the reasons why so many math/engineering/science majors perceive arts/humanities/social science courses as easy or “gut” courses is because:

1. They only take courses which could guarantee them an “easy A” meaning no intermediate or upper-level courses with 600-1200+ page weekly reading loads per class, 20-40+ page research paper requirement, or any serious theory/methodology course. I’ve only seen one science major in the senior-level Chinese politics/history seminars I took…..and that was mainly because she was also doing a second-major in Politics.

2. With the exception of a few schools, most introductory arts/humanities/social-science courses are actually taught as introductory courses. This is quite different from many science and engineering fields where intro courses are often deliberately made harder so they could be used as “weed-out” courses. A bio-major friend at Tufts recalled that over 60% failed in his intro to bio class….and the Prof mentioned later that it was by design to test the seriousness of aspiring bio majors. He also recounted that was the hardest bio-class he took in his entire undergrad career. Though my experience in taking two introductory CS programming classes for majors was not that extreme…flunkout rates of 30-60% were not unheard of.

3. The commonplace mentality that any mathematically intensive field is always more rigorous/harder than the non-mathematically intensive counterparts. Something many classmates who double/triple majored in a science and an arts/humanities/social science field would vigorously dispute.

I’ve even had a few science/engineering/math majors tell me they chose their fields because they felt it was much easier dealing with the relative certainties of quantitative and scientific methods than to deal with what they perceived as the “great blinding uncertainties” of studying the arts/humanities/social-sciences.

Rim me, baby.

I do love the smell of self-important, entitled, pompous fuckhead in the evening.

I took one class with a group of engineers, a Critical Thinking class. Basic stuff, like logical fallacies, misuse of statistics, things that essentially taught you how to read research and extract actual data from persuasive or illogical fluff. I and the three other students pursuing “useless” degree were the only ones who didn’t need to be hand held through the process of THINKING CRITICALLY.

This reminds me of an older friend who mentioned one of the reasons why his engineering school required their students to take writing intensive humanities/social science courses was because the academic dean became fed up with hearing frequent complaints from local NYC area employers that most engineering/science graduates had such atrocious writing skills that they weren’t able to communicate their ideas effectively. He’s also one of the few engineering/CS people I know who despise and will argue vociferously against the commonplace tendency among his fellow engineers/programmers/software engineers to denigrate the arts, humanities, and the social sciences.

Speaking of use/misuse of statistics…..I took a summer stats course post-undergrad while working full-time a few years back at a certain Charles River based institution. The course was heavily populated by mathematically inclined econ majors, a few engineering majors, and even a few math majors with a sprinkling of arts/humanities/social science majors such as myself. Guess who had the most problems with that summer stats course…sometimes to the point many were actually worried about failing??

Does someone need to explain the term “multidisciplinary” to ohcomeon? I’m sure one of us has a basic troll to english dictionary.