I agree completely. But, of course, as someone who will be doing electrical engineering in College, I am a bit biased toward STEM.

While I agree that it is difficult to test accurately in humanities, (hard) science/math IS inherently harder than humanities. Humanities majors lack respect for the technical subjects because they never take the high-level math/engineering courses–their impression of math/engineering is based on some cookbook math recipe class (Calculus, MultiCalc, Statistics). In contrast, technical folks often do take upper level and graduate level humanities courses–and excel in it!

At the highest level, graduate research in sociology, anthropology, etc. are do-able by the everyman. It requires hard work, understanding of the problem, good communication skills, etc, but anyone can do it.

No matter how much training in math or the hard sciences one has, graduate and upper undergraduate courses are just plain difficult and time consuming. Specifically, PhD research in math/hard sciences is plain difficult for me and I think of “giving up” in the sense of switching into less theoretical work in engineering. On paper I’ll still have a PhD in El. Eng., but we feel some real respect for my Chinese/Indian cohorts who do the real “heavy lifting” for our field.

We shouldn’t beat around the bush. Not only are technical subjects (past year 1) much more difficult than the humanities, but they are graded harsher.

This is precisely why I love math & science. There’s no “gray area”, it’s either “black” or “white”. One of the greatest things I love about it that if you don’t know the answer, you can figure it out. The only thing I actually learnt from my English classes is how to write in APA instead of MLA, something I could have taught myself.

[quote comment=”9568″] English is not my first language and on top of that I’m dyslexic.[/quote]
Well, then I must commend you b/c you have a high level of proficiency in English (in your blog posts, at least, since we’ve never spoken). I wish some of my American students were able to piece together a short paper half as well as you write.

It’s always a pleasure to read your posts and thanks for frequently providing food for thought across a range of topics.

[quote post=”2574″]one art teacher may thing your work is brilliant and innovative, while another may consider it shallow and unimpressive.[/quote]

And another art teacher might think your art is brilliant and innovative, but not realize you copied it from another artist.

Great post!

First off, thanks for the clarifications from the non-science people. Good to know that a lot of people are taking the problem of grading things like “crativity”, “perspective” and “originality” seriously.

I still think that doing this requires a competent teacher and those are not always around. :(

@e – if we were graded on grammar and spelling my GPA would have been much, much lower. English is not my first language and on top of that I’m dyslexic.

But yeah, I’m sure that if I took few 300 and 400 (or graduate level) classes in humanities and non-science subjects I would probably see a much different picture.

What can I say, being on the humanities end of it? Work for our students is scored holistically and analytically. There is a good explanation of the two in my field presented in this link. Now imagine if your non-math & science teachers would grade your papers on grammar (the only thing you can grade objectively) rather than content and relevance to your thesis argument? How competent do you think people’s technical writing skills are? Dangling participles, homonyms (it’s/its; their/there; etc.), punctuation…ah, the list could go on. Also, a scary trend is that there is little differentiation for college students with respect to types of writing and audience (email to prof vs. text message to friend).
This does not exist for the sciences…there is no grey area in testing and other forms of evaluation. Plus, if you ever look at my syllabi you would immediately note, like @Alphast mentioned, there are so many components that comprise the final grade that evaluation is continuous simply because of how we score students. It should not be contingent upon just a paper and a final exam. (I hear my humanities and social studies colleagues screaming now that they have enough work to grade as it is…)
Just one last comment re your experience with the gen-ed course. You got away with it because of the audience to which the course was catered. If you were in a non gen-ed environment, that (I hope) would not have happened.

I’ve always found maths/science easier because of the higher degree of precision – there’s an answer, I can work it out, when I’m done and the answer is right I get the marks. Sorted.

Things that require interpretation and opinions and arguments and all that kind of bullshitting around, I find harder to do. Less so as time went on, to the point where I was actually pretty proficient at picking out what point I wanted to make and how to use the sources to support it, but yeah… it was always bullshitting, I just got good at bullshit.

It’s a different skill set I guess… and if it’s marked more leniently then raise the grade boundaries to compensate, or lower the thresholds on the science papers to make them easier (would be better to make the humanities harder though – raise standards a little)

I guess that what you mean is that “hard science” is actually a lot easier to assess than “human sciences” and art. So the grading puts a lot more work on the teacher and a lot less on the students in human science. It is true for instance, that assessing the knowledge, understanding and technique of a sociology student (or, like me, of a political science student) is a lot more difficult than for a math student. Especially if the teacher uses a multiple choice quiz. The topic is very hard and to make sure that the student got it right, the only way is to make him/her write an essay (in limited time), read it and assess it. But of course, that requires work (and a lot of it) from the teacher. Another good way (which was used in my University) is to include a continuous control all over the year, with a mark counting for the final exam. This way, the teacher gets a much finer idea of how the students are performing and understanding the topics. It also allows the students to show creativity, group skills and research skills (absolutely necessary in human sciences and a lot more absent from hard sciences). The teacher can see over the year if the students are showing progress, if they are just copy pasting text from the internet or if they are really grasping the concept and expressing their own ideas with their own words and arguments.

This was a great post title to wake up to!