isbell@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu (Andy Isbell) (04/12/91)
Steinar.Haug@delab.sintef.no (Steinar Haug) (really Cindy Kandolf) writes: >i dont want to stoop to flaming, but i resent the implication in the middle of >your article about liberal arts courses being "easy" in comparison to >engineering/math/science oriented courses. i got good marks all around in >high school, and was generally second in my class in science courses, second >to a fellow who was a genius at sciences. when i hit college i took a lot of >liberal arts courses because they interested me, and i busted my butt on a lot >of them. did well in calculus (almost) without opening the book, but had to >sweat over a russian history survey course to get a decent grade. i think it's >all a matter of difference in individual talent, not in the fundamental >difficulty of the course. there are certainly fundamentally easy lib arts >courses... "cake courses", we called them... but not all liberal arts courses >fall into that area, by a longshot. Isn't it amazing that people will believe stuff like that. I can accept that my wife is probably smarter than I am, but since our strengths lie in different areas, there is really no way of knowing. She is convinced that even though I got lower grades than she did (I got high B's/low A's, she got almost exclusively A's), I am smarter than her because engineering classes are much harder than English classes. Bullshit. I probably still would have gotten lower grades than her if we had switched classes. It has not come up recently, but it's a rather strange sort of twisted logic coming from an otherwise very self-confident, feminist woman. (Of course, her description of herself as a feminist doesn't fit with my mental stereotype of a feminist. But that's another story which would probably get me flamed to a crisp if I posted it.) [stuff about the SAT deleted. Sorry, I never had to take it.] Andy Isbell isbell@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Lab Champaign, IL U.S.A.