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I think the problem isn't inherently the class content (in 'soft' subjects), but how decent the professor is in letting students get by with weak arguments in t

I think the problem isn't inherently the class content (in 'soft' subjects), but how decent the professor is in letting students get by with weak arguments in their papers. I think there's some correlation between how much they actually care about the class, and how tough the class will end up being. I took an English class in college that was probably one of my toughest classes in college (yes, about as tough as my math classes) - the professor and the TA's tore apart each paper ruthlessly, and judged them at a quality slightly below academic papers. I wrote a paper that was well formatted and had decent grammar in it, but it was summarily torn apart and was given a C on the paper, because my arguments in the paper sucked. Also, I'd say that Philosophy is also a pretty damn tough subject in the 'soft subjects' of college. You're expected to be nearly as technical as a mathematician in your arguments, except you're writing essays/articles in prose, rather than with terse explanations and symbols. Philosophy took about as much time for me to study for as my math classes.

jseliger 15y ago
The only word missing in your comment is "incentives:" in academia, professors, especially in soft subjects, don't have much of an incentive to grade accurately; they have an incentive to publish "research" that leads to jobs, tenure, and promotion. If you want professors on the whole to be better and more accurate graders, you have to give them incentives to do so. Which I discuss in more detail here: http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-inflation/ http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-in....
arctangent 15y ago
I'd agree that Philosophy is a tough subject. The reason I'd give for this is that in some sense philosophy does have correct answers, if and only if a question is framed within an existing philosophical model. The point of philosophy (as I see it) is trying to work out which philosophical model is most correct - a bit like a choosing between scientific theories. Instead of testing against measurable things in the real world, philosophers derive logical outcomes from propositions within linguistic/logical systems and compare them to detect inconsistencies. Therefore it's fine to ask a question about the consequences of a particular line of thought if a particular philosophical framework is specified, because you can mark a student not only on whether they arrived at an expected answer but also on the quality of their argument (i.e. how they got there).
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Would it be wrong to call philosophy "abstract {math|logic}"?
  - ezyang 15y ago
    A large an interesting part of being a philosopher involves logic in its purest sense, but it wouldn't right to claim that this is all philosophy is.
  - cafard 15y ago
    Yes, or at least incomplete.
wtvanhest 15y ago
Is it possible that soft subjects are easier not because they are soft, but because weak competition self selects in to those classes?
bane 15y ago
I have to agree w/r to Philosophy. But I've never considered Philosophy as a "soft" subject in the same way as a history class, English lit class, or some similar class. Philosophy is every bit as difficult as any advanced Math course I'm familiar with. You learn the rules and axioms of the philosophy, and work within it, and those rules can be as complicated as any other kind of complex logic. I'm specifically talking about what's considered an undergraduate degree in "English" or "History" or "English History" or some such. I had the fortunate happenstance to go through an undergraduate program that really wanted their engineers to be well rounded. Back in those days we were required to take 3 years of 2 classes a year of English Lit, 2 years of History (a year of Western Civ and a Year of some non-Wester civ), Speech, Communications, etc. for every Engineering Degree and a couple other "soft" courses. These classes were more annoying than hard. Once you figured out what the teacher was looking for (usually within 2 or 3 short essays), you could write all day on that subject and in that style and get A's. It was literally "programming" for the teacher. Good grades were programs that ran well, bad grades due to grammar or spelling issues were syntax errors, bad grades due to content were run-time.
- FreakLegion 15y ago
  You're making two mistakes here. The first is that you're confusing the quality of your (from the sound of it, lower division) undergraduate English program with the quality of English as a discipline. The study of literature, in English or any other language, is, at its core, philosophical. The second is that no discipline, not even engineering, is immune to students coasting by doing the bare minimum. Criticizing English because you breezed through a couple of lower division surveys is like criticizing computer science because you breezed through a class on HTML.
  - quanticle 15y ago
    The difference is in the level of the bare minimum. Engineering and science have objective, right-or-wrong answers. At the end of the test, either you got the right answer, or you didn't. This imposes a certain minimum level of rigor that, in my experience, is wholly missing from the liberal arts. Yes, if taught well, the liberal arts can be as rigorous as mathematics. But teaching, say, English, well is whole lot harder than teaching mathematics well. There's just a lot more subtlety that has to be communicated. This means that in practice, there are proportionally fewer good Liberal Arts teachers than there are good math teachers. The quality and rigor of undergraduate liberal arts suffers as a result.
shareme 15y ago
come on..that was my senior English in high school 20 years ago..and yu call that hard?

jseliger 15y ago

The only word missing in your comment is "incentives:" in academia, professors, especially in soft subjects, don't have much of an incentive to grade accurately; they have an incentive to publish "research" that leads to jobs, tenure, and promotion. If you want professors on the whole to be better and more accurate graders, you have to give them incentives to do so. Which I discuss in more detail here: http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-inflation/ http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-in....

arctangent 15y ago

I'd agree that Philosophy is a tough subject. The reason I'd give for this is that in some sense philosophy does have correct answers, if and only if a question is framed within an existing philosophical model. The point of philosophy (as I see it) is trying to work out which philosophical model is most correct - a bit like a choosing between scientific theories. Instead of testing against measurable things in the real world, philosophers derive logical outcomes from propositions within linguistic/logical systems and compare them to detect inconsistencies. Therefore it's fine to ask a question about the consequences of a particular line of thought if a particular philosophical framework is specified, because you can mark a student not only on whether they arrived at an expected answer but also on the quality of their argument (i.e. how they got there).

sliverstorm 15y ago
Would it be wrong to call philosophy "abstract {math|logic}"?
- ezyang 15y ago
  A large an interesting part of being a philosopher involves logic in its purest sense, but it wouldn't right to claim that this is all philosophy is.
- cafard 15y ago
  Yes, or at least incomplete.

wtvanhest 15y ago

Is it possible that soft subjects are easier not because they are soft, but because weak competition self selects in to those classes?

bane 15y ago

I have to agree w/r to Philosophy. But I've never considered Philosophy as a "soft" subject in the same way as a history class, English lit class, or some similar class. Philosophy is every bit as difficult as any advanced Math course I'm familiar with. You learn the rules and axioms of the philosophy, and work within it, and those rules can be as complicated as any other kind of complex logic. I'm specifically talking about what's considered an undergraduate degree in "English" or "History" or "English History" or some such. I had the fortunate happenstance to go through an undergraduate program that really wanted their engineers to be well rounded. Back in those days we were required to take 3 years of 2 classes a year of English Lit, 2 years of History (a year of Western Civ and a Year of some non-Wester civ), Speech, Communications, etc. for every Engineering Degree and a couple other "soft" courses. These classes were more annoying than hard. Once you figured out what the teacher was looking for (usually within 2 or 3 short essays), you could write all day on that subject and in that style and get A's. It was literally "programming" for the teacher. Good grades were programs that ran well, bad grades due to grammar or spelling issues were syntax errors, bad grades due to content were run-time.

FreakLegion 15y ago
You're making two mistakes here. The first is that you're confusing the quality of your (from the sound of it, lower division) undergraduate English program with the quality of English as a discipline. The study of literature, in English or any other language, is, at its core, philosophical. The second is that no discipline, not even engineering, is immune to students coasting by doing the bare minimum. Criticizing English because you breezed through a couple of lower division surveys is like criticizing computer science because you breezed through a class on HTML.
- quanticle 15y ago
  The difference is in the level of the bare minimum. Engineering and science have objective, right-or-wrong answers. At the end of the test, either you got the right answer, or you didn't. This imposes a certain minimum level of rigor that, in my experience, is wholly missing from the liberal arts. Yes, if taught well, the liberal arts can be as rigorous as mathematics. But teaching, say, English, well is whole lot harder than teaching mathematics well. There's just a lot more subtlety that has to be communicated. This means that in practice, there are proportionally fewer good Liberal Arts teachers than there are good math teachers. The quality and rigor of undergraduate liberal arts suffers as a result.

shareme 15y ago

come on..that was my senior English in high school 20 years ago..and yu call that hard?