dreamteam_41
New member
Everyone always talks about how humanities students have it easy and their work is not as difficult, etc. So my question is why don't universities just jack up their standards for humanities/ social science majors? I have been thinking about this recently and I think it makes sense.
These majors are NOT easy by nature, I just think that professors in these areas of study usually do not mark hard enough and push their students hard enough (the one exception I have seen is Latin, they seem to give lots and lots of work for Latin students.)
As I did history I know that it can involve huge amount of hard work if you are to take the subject seriously, while I was doing my masters research I was working just as hard as my best friend who was doing research in engineering.
History can be very difficult if you want to do real serious and original research. At the moment I am in South Korea working and doing historical research in my free time and I must say it is very hard. I have no background in Asian history at all, I am doing it mostly for political reasons because I am interested in informing people of the people's committees that existed in South Korea after the liberation from the japanese. I am visiting record collections and busting my brains reading the unpublished materials from post colonial Japan. I can read a fair bit of Korean, however many of the records from the time require a high level of knowledge of Chinese characters and their specific usage in Korea (even lots of younger generation Koreans are not too up to this because Hangal has taken over Hanja Chinese characters and some characters had specific meanings for the specific department tat was using it). On top of this some of the records were written quickly and in hard to read handwriting- making sense of all this is very difficult and takes many hours of hard work.
My point of all this is that it is possible to make arts and humanities difficult- it is just that they have a tendency to pass idiots who submit crap, miss lectures, or are simply not bight enough to do good research and reach interesting conclusions.
So the simple answer is why not just jack up the standards?
These majors are NOT easy by nature, I just think that professors in these areas of study usually do not mark hard enough and push their students hard enough (the one exception I have seen is Latin, they seem to give lots and lots of work for Latin students.)
As I did history I know that it can involve huge amount of hard work if you are to take the subject seriously, while I was doing my masters research I was working just as hard as my best friend who was doing research in engineering.
History can be very difficult if you want to do real serious and original research. At the moment I am in South Korea working and doing historical research in my free time and I must say it is very hard. I have no background in Asian history at all, I am doing it mostly for political reasons because I am interested in informing people of the people's committees that existed in South Korea after the liberation from the japanese. I am visiting record collections and busting my brains reading the unpublished materials from post colonial Japan. I can read a fair bit of Korean, however many of the records from the time require a high level of knowledge of Chinese characters and their specific usage in Korea (even lots of younger generation Koreans are not too up to this because Hangal has taken over Hanja Chinese characters and some characters had specific meanings for the specific department tat was using it). On top of this some of the records were written quickly and in hard to read handwriting- making sense of all this is very difficult and takes many hours of hard work.
My point of all this is that it is possible to make arts and humanities difficult- it is just that they have a tendency to pass idiots who submit crap, miss lectures, or are simply not bight enough to do good research and reach interesting conclusions.
So the simple answer is why not just jack up the standards?