Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!aero-c!nadel
From: isbell@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu (Andy Isbell)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Difficulty of liberal arts vs. science classes
Message-ID: <1991Apr11.175533.23614@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 11 Apr 91 17:55:33 GMT
References: <1991Apr9.203133.2551@aero.org> <1991Apr10.203325*Steinar.Haug@delab.sintef.no>
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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.