Because Nobody Wanted It
Sep. 30th, 2005 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynI must admit, I'm disappointed in my Friends List. It seems that, although I have chosen intelligent and thoughtful people, the number of people on my FL who are wont to begin foaming at the mouth in rage and proceed to attack me intellectually form a very small minority. In fact, I don't think I've ever been able to entice anybody into a fight at all.
Well, that won't do.
So I'm being forced to take drastic measures. In an attempt to instigate some manner of conflict, I am now going to castigate the Liberal Arts curricula in American Universities. In the process I will probably end up insulting half of the Liberal Arts majors in the world, several of whom appear to be on my friends list. But that's okay. I can handle your flaming. Bring it on!
...please?
Let's be honest, Science and Engineering students (S&E), have never gotten along with the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) crowd. These two just don't get along well together. On one side, S&E protests at the large influence that HSS wields on campus compared to their publishable results, their progress, and the amount of practical applications that they have. For their own part, HSS objects to the money lavished on S&E, and the commercial nature of S&E research. The two sides simply will not get along.
But lately, issues have been getting thornier between the two. Part of it is tradition, of course, and the newfound muscle that S&E can flex on the university campus, but part of it is an increasing divide between the two disciplines.
One traditional sticking point has always been the notion of Core classes. For those of your who have so far escaped any knowledge of the American University system (not a bad idea), Core classes are sometimes known elsewhere as General Education requirements, and are the chance for undergraduate students to be exposed to all areas of academia (or at least some areas). Many colleges require about one Core class a term for four years, expected graduation time.
But Core requirements are, and have always been, more weighted toward HSS courses than S&E courses. This has always raised some discontent among S&E students. Why do we have to take nine terms of HSS courses, where they get to breeze through with only three terms of Science and Math requirements, we grumble. Of course, for the most part it's good natured grumbling, but sometimes it's not. That's only the start of the problem.
For the past several years I've been collecting the assorted grumblings of my fellow students, which I have finally decided to share:
First-Why are General Education requirements balanced in the favor of HSS?
HSS has pointed out, for years, that they teach not only basic knowledge, but life skills. After all, every functional citizen of the modern world needs the ability to analyze and understand a basic newspaper article, recognize historical and cultural imperatives behind such an announcement, and interpret possible courses of action. Big whoop. S&E can point out, rightfully, that they do the same thing. Not only do good science courses teach you about the way the world works, from cells to space stations, but it also teaches you similar life skills. Analytical thinking skills, as well as problem solving skills, are demanded by most science courses. If you can't learn to approach a problem from either practical or analytical standpoints, you should not expect to be successful at life.
Of course, you can learn analytical thinking skills from the HSS side. Just like you can learn interpretation skills from science, and not need to depend on HSS instruction. There is a polite consensus at the university level that both sides are equally valuable. Then why not give them equal time?
Second-Why the different courses?
UCSD has a course that the TAs refer to, disparagingly, as Physics for Poets, also known as Physics for Non-Science Majors. There's a similar one in every department. Science for people who don't want to learn science. The courses in the humanities sections are not quite similar. There are, of course, lower division courses, but everyone is expected to take them. There's no Lower Division History for Science and Engineering Majors, even though there might need to be. There are just Lower Division History courses. Why is it that we need to come up with a special "dumbed down" version of Physics in order to teach them, when we don't need the same treatment from them?
To further the problem, many science students as undergrads took Upper Division courses in the HSS field to fulfill their requirements because they found the topics interesting. I've never met a Humanities major who returned the favor. Why is that, we sometimes wonder? Maybe we need to rethink how we do our courses.
Third-Why the grade difference?
A common phrase used by science majors to refer to humanities courses, even upper division ones, is "grade boosters", or "GPA boosters". I've met only a few on our side of the line who have ever considered a humanities course difficult when it did not involve a higher level economics or political science course. A lot of physicists dislike some parts of higher economics because they have a method of finding eigenvalues of infinite dimensional matricies that looks very strange to us, among other problems. Similarly, PolySci involves a great deal of game theory, and physicists tend to not be very good at game theory. Notice though that these are problems with the math, not the class. Your average graduate has learned at some point how to crank out a ten page English paper in an evening.
Perhaps some of this is due to the scientist's frame of mind. After all, upon coming upon a literary essay question, the physicist says:
This is a problem -> This requires a solution -> I need to find a solution -> Hence I need an idea -> Now I need some evidence -> Now I need to develop my thesis -> Now I need to write the paper
whereas the humanities major may get caught up on trying to develop the perfect idea. A science major tends to grab the first reasonable idea through their head (usually one they've been thinking of) and go with it. Once they start writing, speed and ability seem pretty much equal, but the science major often has a head start. Of course, this is the wrong way to go about actually writing a literary essay, but it seems to sneak through the Professor's grading scheme. Presumably, the closer you get to graduate level literature courses, the easier it gets to catch this, although sometimes it's hard to see how.
On the other hand I have never, except for possibly once, heard a humanities major refer to a physics course of any sort as easy. Or even a math course. Why is this so different? The difficulty level seems to be little changed between one course and another, but why the disparity in the grading level? Do humanities professors grade more leniently? Do physics professors grade to hard? Unlikely, physics professors don't grade hard enough, we don't force an actual understanding of the subject. So where does this come from?
Fourth-Why do we keep pretending things are equal?
This is perhaps where all the problems really come from. Let's say there's a mixup at the Registrar's office, and a third year physics student gets dropped into a high-end upper division history course, while a third year history student gets dropped into a similar level course in the physics department. The outcome? The physics student will get numerous comments about the lack of polish on his papers, with critical notes examining his ability to draw meaning out of primary sources. However, he will probably pass the course with a B or a B+, having discovered enough insight into the minds of Augustine of Hippo or whomever to satisfy the instructor. The history student will fail. One term is not enough to make up all the knowledge that they've missed out on so far.
Fair enough, science is far more hierarchal than the humanities. You must take course A before course B, otherwise you really will have no idea what's being discussed, whereas in the humanities you can sort of blunder along until you get your feet under you. But the lack of preparation seems to go much deeper than that, and it violates one of the tenets that I hold dear for university education.
It is my opinion, you can disagree, that up until the beginning of their third year an undergraduate should be able to change their major and still, with some hard work, graduate in four years. This seems to be possible on the humanities side, it will take some hard work, but you can do it. Your chances of going the other direction are almost nil.
Put it this way. Biology students are usually chosen for their ability in the sciences. This includes mathematical aptitude, since biology is a science. Yet I routinely find biology students, lots of biology students, whose mathematical skills I would consider insufficient to graduate from ninth grade. And many students from HSS are even worse. We routinely demand that every student who comes to the University of California have taken three courses of High School math and four courses of High School english, but, while I'm confident that the essay writing skills of all students are generally not below a certain mark, I'm damn certain that there is a disparity in mathematical ability.
Which means that, if a philosophy student or an art student decides to switch to physics there is a very real chance that they may have to basically start their college education over, from the basic math and science courses all the way up to the top. In contrast, the gap does not seem nearly as bad going in the other direction.
This has lead to a lot of debate. It's almost like there are two streams of students coming in, students coming to one side have to be proficient in both math and English, students in the other direction are English only. Of course, this is horribly unfair-there are many, many humanities majors who are top-notch at math, and many others who could easily become science majors if they found it at all interesting. It's just, from our side of the fence, the ignorance over there looks much worse than the ignorance over here. Hopefully this is just a grass-is-greener issue.
Fifth - Can we talk sometime?
There are very intelligent, dedicated, and reasonable humanities students. I'm positive of this. I think I've even caught glimpses of them from time to time. Problem is, they stay in their offices, and we stay in ours. That's at the graduate level, but at the undergraduate level it's not much different. Our only real impression of humanities students come from your slackers. Those are the people who come over and complain about how life is hard and they have to write a pair of ten page papers before next Friday. Bitch, please. I can crank out a seventeen page paper in three hours if I have to. I don't like to, but I can do it. Meanwhile, students who have just faced the twenty hour grind of yet another homework set for Quantum Mechanics stare at them rather balefully.
I suppose there are equal horror stories from the other side of the bench. The point is, we have no idea what you guys do or where you are. And we have a lot to share. You can also join us in the finger-pointing game, where we point our fingers at a variety of people and blame them for the general low quality of incoming freshmen. Of course, we mock their mathematical ability, and you probably mock something else, but what the hell? It's all good fun.
Point being, we know what we do. We can point to space stations, and the space elevator, fusion reactors, chemical transmutation, and artificial insulin production systems, but we don't know what the guys on the other side of the fence do. We would like to find out sometimes, but there's a barrier that seems to have grown between us. Graduate students don't break that down, but it would be nice to come around and talk sometimes. Familiarity may breed contempt, but separation breeds downright hostility.
The point, after all that rambling, is that a lot of people feel that we are turning out many students who are equally capable of writing long analytical essays, but one side seems to be fundamentally lacking in any knowledge of mathematics and science. Perhaps it gives something to the flourishing of pseudoscience, and the continuing reign of both scientific ignorance and unrealistic expectations in today's society. We aren't asking for people to dump the Liberal Arts, but we would like modern science to be integrated much more effectively into the modern curriculum. If anything, we should have the dominant position, but that's not something we're pushing for. But, if we're going to rubber stamp our university graduates as prepared for the real world, we should probably give them a scientific grounding as thorough as their literature grounding.
And our current courses aren't going to do it. I can literally watch information flow in one ear and out the other. Comprehension continually eludes students, and they don't seem the least bit interested in working for it. I want enough rigor in the Core requirements that each student who graduates knows how a cell works, how chemical reactions occur, what molecules are, what causes motorized vehicles to move and what their limits are, and why their computer works. People should not fall for strange perpetural motion machine scams, peculiar magnetic or ion therapy claims, miracle cures, or any number of other fake occurrences. Plus, they should have a reasonable knowledge of what the different fields in science do. These are voting citizens; I want them to understand what they are voting for, and what the limits of technological solutions are. And to do that, I want to up the rigor and the courseload on their side of the line. I think it can be done. I don't see any reason why it can't be done. And I think that it's essential that we at least try.
And everyone should have at least some basic math skills.
All right, if that didn't get somebody angry at me, I'll have to resort to demanding money in exchange for writing crappy fanfiction.
Well, that won't do.
So I'm being forced to take drastic measures. In an attempt to instigate some manner of conflict, I am now going to castigate the Liberal Arts curricula in American Universities. In the process I will probably end up insulting half of the Liberal Arts majors in the world, several of whom appear to be on my friends list. But that's okay. I can handle your flaming. Bring it on!
...please?
Let's be honest, Science and Engineering students (S&E), have never gotten along with the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) crowd. These two just don't get along well together. On one side, S&E protests at the large influence that HSS wields on campus compared to their publishable results, their progress, and the amount of practical applications that they have. For their own part, HSS objects to the money lavished on S&E, and the commercial nature of S&E research. The two sides simply will not get along.
But lately, issues have been getting thornier between the two. Part of it is tradition, of course, and the newfound muscle that S&E can flex on the university campus, but part of it is an increasing divide between the two disciplines.
One traditional sticking point has always been the notion of Core classes. For those of your who have so far escaped any knowledge of the American University system (not a bad idea), Core classes are sometimes known elsewhere as General Education requirements, and are the chance for undergraduate students to be exposed to all areas of academia (or at least some areas). Many colleges require about one Core class a term for four years, expected graduation time.
But Core requirements are, and have always been, more weighted toward HSS courses than S&E courses. This has always raised some discontent among S&E students. Why do we have to take nine terms of HSS courses, where they get to breeze through with only three terms of Science and Math requirements, we grumble. Of course, for the most part it's good natured grumbling, but sometimes it's not. That's only the start of the problem.
For the past several years I've been collecting the assorted grumblings of my fellow students, which I have finally decided to share:
First-Why are General Education requirements balanced in the favor of HSS?
HSS has pointed out, for years, that they teach not only basic knowledge, but life skills. After all, every functional citizen of the modern world needs the ability to analyze and understand a basic newspaper article, recognize historical and cultural imperatives behind such an announcement, and interpret possible courses of action. Big whoop. S&E can point out, rightfully, that they do the same thing. Not only do good science courses teach you about the way the world works, from cells to space stations, but it also teaches you similar life skills. Analytical thinking skills, as well as problem solving skills, are demanded by most science courses. If you can't learn to approach a problem from either practical or analytical standpoints, you should not expect to be successful at life.
Of course, you can learn analytical thinking skills from the HSS side. Just like you can learn interpretation skills from science, and not need to depend on HSS instruction. There is a polite consensus at the university level that both sides are equally valuable. Then why not give them equal time?
Second-Why the different courses?
UCSD has a course that the TAs refer to, disparagingly, as Physics for Poets, also known as Physics for Non-Science Majors. There's a similar one in every department. Science for people who don't want to learn science. The courses in the humanities sections are not quite similar. There are, of course, lower division courses, but everyone is expected to take them. There's no Lower Division History for Science and Engineering Majors, even though there might need to be. There are just Lower Division History courses. Why is it that we need to come up with a special "dumbed down" version of Physics in order to teach them, when we don't need the same treatment from them?
To further the problem, many science students as undergrads took Upper Division courses in the HSS field to fulfill their requirements because they found the topics interesting. I've never met a Humanities major who returned the favor. Why is that, we sometimes wonder? Maybe we need to rethink how we do our courses.
Third-Why the grade difference?
A common phrase used by science majors to refer to humanities courses, even upper division ones, is "grade boosters", or "GPA boosters". I've met only a few on our side of the line who have ever considered a humanities course difficult when it did not involve a higher level economics or political science course. A lot of physicists dislike some parts of higher economics because they have a method of finding eigenvalues of infinite dimensional matricies that looks very strange to us, among other problems. Similarly, PolySci involves a great deal of game theory, and physicists tend to not be very good at game theory. Notice though that these are problems with the math, not the class. Your average graduate has learned at some point how to crank out a ten page English paper in an evening.
Perhaps some of this is due to the scientist's frame of mind. After all, upon coming upon a literary essay question, the physicist says:
This is a problem -> This requires a solution -> I need to find a solution -> Hence I need an idea -> Now I need some evidence -> Now I need to develop my thesis -> Now I need to write the paper
whereas the humanities major may get caught up on trying to develop the perfect idea. A science major tends to grab the first reasonable idea through their head (usually one they've been thinking of) and go with it. Once they start writing, speed and ability seem pretty much equal, but the science major often has a head start. Of course, this is the wrong way to go about actually writing a literary essay, but it seems to sneak through the Professor's grading scheme. Presumably, the closer you get to graduate level literature courses, the easier it gets to catch this, although sometimes it's hard to see how.
On the other hand I have never, except for possibly once, heard a humanities major refer to a physics course of any sort as easy. Or even a math course. Why is this so different? The difficulty level seems to be little changed between one course and another, but why the disparity in the grading level? Do humanities professors grade more leniently? Do physics professors grade to hard? Unlikely, physics professors don't grade hard enough, we don't force an actual understanding of the subject. So where does this come from?
Fourth-Why do we keep pretending things are equal?
This is perhaps where all the problems really come from. Let's say there's a mixup at the Registrar's office, and a third year physics student gets dropped into a high-end upper division history course, while a third year history student gets dropped into a similar level course in the physics department. The outcome? The physics student will get numerous comments about the lack of polish on his papers, with critical notes examining his ability to draw meaning out of primary sources. However, he will probably pass the course with a B or a B+, having discovered enough insight into the minds of Augustine of Hippo or whomever to satisfy the instructor. The history student will fail. One term is not enough to make up all the knowledge that they've missed out on so far.
Fair enough, science is far more hierarchal than the humanities. You must take course A before course B, otherwise you really will have no idea what's being discussed, whereas in the humanities you can sort of blunder along until you get your feet under you. But the lack of preparation seems to go much deeper than that, and it violates one of the tenets that I hold dear for university education.
It is my opinion, you can disagree, that up until the beginning of their third year an undergraduate should be able to change their major and still, with some hard work, graduate in four years. This seems to be possible on the humanities side, it will take some hard work, but you can do it. Your chances of going the other direction are almost nil.
Put it this way. Biology students are usually chosen for their ability in the sciences. This includes mathematical aptitude, since biology is a science. Yet I routinely find biology students, lots of biology students, whose mathematical skills I would consider insufficient to graduate from ninth grade. And many students from HSS are even worse. We routinely demand that every student who comes to the University of California have taken three courses of High School math and four courses of High School english, but, while I'm confident that the essay writing skills of all students are generally not below a certain mark, I'm damn certain that there is a disparity in mathematical ability.
Which means that, if a philosophy student or an art student decides to switch to physics there is a very real chance that they may have to basically start their college education over, from the basic math and science courses all the way up to the top. In contrast, the gap does not seem nearly as bad going in the other direction.
This has lead to a lot of debate. It's almost like there are two streams of students coming in, students coming to one side have to be proficient in both math and English, students in the other direction are English only. Of course, this is horribly unfair-there are many, many humanities majors who are top-notch at math, and many others who could easily become science majors if they found it at all interesting. It's just, from our side of the fence, the ignorance over there looks much worse than the ignorance over here. Hopefully this is just a grass-is-greener issue.
Fifth - Can we talk sometime?
There are very intelligent, dedicated, and reasonable humanities students. I'm positive of this. I think I've even caught glimpses of them from time to time. Problem is, they stay in their offices, and we stay in ours. That's at the graduate level, but at the undergraduate level it's not much different. Our only real impression of humanities students come from your slackers. Those are the people who come over and complain about how life is hard and they have to write a pair of ten page papers before next Friday. Bitch, please. I can crank out a seventeen page paper in three hours if I have to. I don't like to, but I can do it. Meanwhile, students who have just faced the twenty hour grind of yet another homework set for Quantum Mechanics stare at them rather balefully.
I suppose there are equal horror stories from the other side of the bench. The point is, we have no idea what you guys do or where you are. And we have a lot to share. You can also join us in the finger-pointing game, where we point our fingers at a variety of people and blame them for the general low quality of incoming freshmen. Of course, we mock their mathematical ability, and you probably mock something else, but what the hell? It's all good fun.
Point being, we know what we do. We can point to space stations, and the space elevator, fusion reactors, chemical transmutation, and artificial insulin production systems, but we don't know what the guys on the other side of the fence do. We would like to find out sometimes, but there's a barrier that seems to have grown between us. Graduate students don't break that down, but it would be nice to come around and talk sometimes. Familiarity may breed contempt, but separation breeds downright hostility.
The point, after all that rambling, is that a lot of people feel that we are turning out many students who are equally capable of writing long analytical essays, but one side seems to be fundamentally lacking in any knowledge of mathematics and science. Perhaps it gives something to the flourishing of pseudoscience, and the continuing reign of both scientific ignorance and unrealistic expectations in today's society. We aren't asking for people to dump the Liberal Arts, but we would like modern science to be integrated much more effectively into the modern curriculum. If anything, we should have the dominant position, but that's not something we're pushing for. But, if we're going to rubber stamp our university graduates as prepared for the real world, we should probably give them a scientific grounding as thorough as their literature grounding.
And our current courses aren't going to do it. I can literally watch information flow in one ear and out the other. Comprehension continually eludes students, and they don't seem the least bit interested in working for it. I want enough rigor in the Core requirements that each student who graduates knows how a cell works, how chemical reactions occur, what molecules are, what causes motorized vehicles to move and what their limits are, and why their computer works. People should not fall for strange perpetural motion machine scams, peculiar magnetic or ion therapy claims, miracle cures, or any number of other fake occurrences. Plus, they should have a reasonable knowledge of what the different fields in science do. These are voting citizens; I want them to understand what they are voting for, and what the limits of technological solutions are. And to do that, I want to up the rigor and the courseload on their side of the line. I think it can be done. I don't see any reason why it can't be done. And I think that it's essential that we at least try.
And everyone should have at least some basic math skills.
All right, if that didn't get somebody angry at me, I'll have to resort to demanding money in exchange for writing crappy fanfiction.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-01 04:48 pm (UTC)The truth is, by college most people have an idea of what they want to do, and what it will require. The paths in life I wish to walk keep mathematical knowledge to a minimum; however, everyone everywhere will at some point be need to communicate and recieve communication effectivly. Hence, writing requirements stick with you.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-01 05:06 pm (UTC)I'm going to argue the point. There are a lot of people, perhaps not a majority but a sizeable minority, who change their paths in college. It's just that they discover that what they thought they wanted to do is not actually what they wanted to do. Since college is where most people first experience what a profession really does, it should be a place where you can jump tracks. I think that starting out basically saying that you can jump tracks into S&E, even though you can jump out, is a bad way to run a system like that.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-01 05:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-01 05:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-01 06:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-01 06:21 pm (UTC)I don't like the idea that a science major has the background to change their mind and become a humanities major, but that a humanities major has a lot more trouble going to other direction. And I think that a good general education would incorporate both sides at a leve closer to equality.
Did that make any sense?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-01 06:44 pm (UTC)But not if it measn I have to take math classes... *ducks and hides from the scary mean integers*
Actually, I think I'm basically in favor of not having required classes at all at a college level, except maybe for the first semester of your freshman year or something. Let them experiment...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-02 12:02 am (UTC)