No Math Please, We're Arts Majors!
'Nee: “Sadly, lots of people take arts exactly because they don't have the math skills for another subject - skills which I feel should be mandatory for everybody, regardless of their faculty.”
I took a Political Science degree precisely because I got a D in first-year Math and an F in (honours) first-year Physics. g.girl talks about how hard university is supposed to be, and my comment, copied from her site, appears here:
I know a guy who didn't go to grad school to get a business degree because the value of the degree is low. (Also, he's making too much money at his current job to quit and go to school. Opportunity costs.....)
My first year and a bit had that "holy shit this is hard" feeling, but during the third and fourth years (and the fifth and sixth) it seemed to me that the profs weren't grading very hardly, since I wasn't putting nearly the amount of effort into my papers that I could have been. I'm not exaggerating when I say I got an A- in the class where I wrote the worst paper of my life. Yes, the very worst.
It also depends on how you value your degree. Some think in monetary terms, but since my degree was in political science, yeah, you can finish that sentence better than I can. But I was at least exposed to some bright minds and learned, to an extent, how to think on my feet. I'm sitting in first-year classes, and thoughts come to me at light-speed compared to these people, which isn't as big a dis as it could be, because I was rather slow-witted myself in my first year.
It doesn't seem to me like they're challenging the first-years as much as they were before. I mean, c'mon, 5-page papers? Gimme a break! I was expected to write a 12-pager in my first-year political science class, and it was 12 days late. (Lucky I got 84% before 12% was taken off!) Anyway, yeah, to an extent, they're giving them away, but with the increases in tuition, you're probably going to see a higher value placed on degrees by employers: if people are willing to go into that much debt to get an education, they also must be willing to work hard at it in order to get a job that can pay off said debt. (The people who have mommy and daddy paying for their education, well, good luck to them in the real world.)
