Sitting down to lunch the other day, it was the same old story: \I was up at 7:45 this morning!"" while another friend of mine remarked how much she was looking forward to her three-hour lab later in the day. Having just woken up, I leaned back in my chair and smiled. Damn, it's good to be a political science major.
Sound familiar? Oftentimes, I've noted how seemingly rough my science-major friends have it compared to us in the humanities and social sciences. This usually results in a lot of jokes and a lack of respect for the latter, as it appears to be much easier.
Why is that? Most often, I've heard the time commitment argument advanced by science majors. ""Well, I have three lectures, two discussions and a lab!"" Sounds tedious, doesn't it? That's because it is, entirely too much so, I'd argue. Why time constraints make anything more difficult is beyond me. In my limited experience with the ""actual"" sciences, repetitiveness causes a lot of this. This, by the very nature of science, is a necessary cost of learning the material. And while I understand that aspect of it, I fail to see why that's more respectable. Repetition may be all well and good, but I believe the real intent of such exercises is to teach the ability to critically assess, evaluate and apply a particular principle.
Early morning classes, you say? In my experience, early morning classes are about as smart as George W. Bush. As I'm concerned, early classes tend to make me, dumber rather than smarter. A pain in the butt? Most definitely. Better? I doubt it. Humanities instead seem to favor the so-called ""power lecture,"" which means longer classes, fewer days. This isn't a cakewalk either.
Regardless of the time, humanities teach the same values as the sciences, only via different means. Based more on interpretation and analysis, the focus of the humanities is more expansive and, consequently, allows more room for interpretation. By its very nature, there may not be just one right answer. To me, this seems just as, if not more, difficult than one definite answer. If I don't know what I'm doing, I can go completely in the wrong direction on an essay. If I haven't engaged the material, if I don't understand it, I could piece together a five-page-long answer that essentially says nothing, and would be graded as such. Now, does that make things easier or more difficult?
No less, no more, I'd argue. If the end is to teach students to critically assess and to form their own understanding of a principle, then why does the means matter? Trying to judge competing methods seems to be entirely too subjective and arbitrary. To critique one and put the other on a pedestal fails to recognize that, while similar goals exist, the relative differences of the subject don't allow them to be taught in the same way.
Who's to judge? My buddies give me plenty of crap while I type up my take-home essay, on which I can use my book my choice of questions, as they grudgingly head toward their in-class, multiple choice or short-answer, closed book exams. Do I prefer my method over their's? You bet. But because it's easier? Not so much.
When we were admitted to this university, no distinctions were made between us on the basis of intended majors. Everyone is expected to have similar capabilities. As such, would certain majors be dumbed down over others? Not necessarily. I may sit for hours pouring over a book which contains the answer to the question on which I'm being asked to write, but that's because I have to. The standards on such exams are much higher because professors are aware of this. There are no points awarded for writing down a formula that might pertain to the question asked, there's often no curve and there's no choice of answers to pick from. Neither type of exam is necessarily easier than the other one, but instead represents (and I hesitate to quote Gary Coleman) ""different strokes for different folks."" The bottom line is this: All an undergraduate degree at this university says is that you know how to learn, that you have a work ethic and that you're an educated person in a more expansive way than you were after high school. To draw any distinctions past that misses the point.
I'll probably leave this university having no idea what the mechanism for decarboxylation of a beta-ketoacid is or what the operant condition of a marmoset is, but I will leave with the capability to interpret and analyze something I've never seen before in the same way that science majors (with a lot more technical jargon) will be able to do. In the end, this is all that matters.
