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Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Math isn't "too hard". It's about grade inflation. When my parents were in school, a 2.5 grade-point average was around the median, and 3.0 was good enough to get into graduate school.

Math and science courses still give real grades, with Bs and Cs for average work. Liberal arts classes have been inflated at most universities, to the point that getting a C is essentially failure. People get this perception that math is "harder" because of grading skew.

Also, with top employers refusing to look at resumes with GPAs below 3.5 (regardless of university, major, etc.) it makes sense that people would gravitate toward the "easier" majors.

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I don't know that it's grade inflation.. I think it's the fear of being wrong.

Look at Moniz (in the article), he bailed on engineering and went to an English/Psych where the classes are "a lot more discussion based."

In math, there are right and wrong answers. In physics, there are right and wrong answers. In engineering - where math & science hit the real world - there are "best answers given the requirements" but it's a similar concept.

In English & Psychology, not so much. There are points of view, interpretations, theories, speculation, and working models, but there are very few "right answers" and lots of "reasonable interpretations."

> Look at Moniz (in the article), he bailed on engineering and went to an English/Psych where the classes are "a lot more discussion based."

The impression that I got wasn't that he bailed for discussion courses because he was afraid of being wrong, but rather that the discussions in English classes at least gave him some outlet to feel like he was applying what he was learning.

There's a very weird death march of lectures for 2-3 years in some engineering programs during which you're expected to cram in a ton of knowledge but given zero opportunity to see how it will be applied in the real world. Compared with my own CS background it looks horrific; if I had been expected to spend my sophomore and junior years doing nothing but sit in lecture halls doing theory courses and "practical" courses in which I memorized syntax for programming languages, or facts about OpenGL, or the ISA of a MIPS CPU, etc without being allowed near a computer to actually build some kind of project using that knowledge, I'd have fucked off into Philosophy or English, too. At least it would have made time for me to make stabs at using what I was learning to do philosophy instead of simply regurgitate facts. But luckily for my future employability, CS isn't so lost to bad pedagogy that it's thrown out most of its practical learning opportunities.

My primary take away from this piece, and talking to people who have burned out of physics and engineering programs, has been that a lot of said programs are simply structured in a way almost guaranteed to try the patience of a lot of otherwise bright people who just wanted to feel like they were making progress towards being able to accomplish something more than regurgitate facts on midterms.

Science / Math courses force you to very objectively face how good you are at the subject being taught. Fields which are more subjective leave your expertise as a much less defined concept and hence do not force the student to confront the limit of their abilities.

Sure, but that doesn't mean that everyone switching out of STEM courses "failed to measure up" or was "afraid of facts".

If I attempted to teach Computing Science to people by having them sit in 400 person lecture halls while I read K&R and CLRS at them for 4 years, any number of bright people who could succeed in comp sci would rightly get fed up with the uselessness of my shitty curriculum and drop out or switch majors. And yet a surprising number of Engineering curriculums are structured this way, because it's cheap and easy for the professors.

So are econ courses at big universities, yet it's become a very popular major.

I recently started teaching technical subjects and here are some points from the other side of the classroom a) Every class has outliers on either side of the performance spectrum and teaching is a resource allocation problem on part of the teachers time on how to deliver maximal benefit to the students at large. b) The number of people who are simultaneously entertaining, inspiring and educational is very few. Look around you and shortlist the number of people whom you consider extremely knowledgeable about some subject, now remove from that list the number of people who have great people skills. Of course people skills can be improved over time but it takes real effort and time. c) As a teacher the best one can do while teaching challenging material is spend time in the first part of a lecture developing the motivation for getting students interested. Usually that leaves little time for interactivity in the latter part of the lesson. d) Classes where students ask no questions are very hard to make interesting. When this is happening your teacher is probably feeling like a comic doing an act where no one is laughing. Next time youre stuck in a class which seems overly dull try to help out your teacher by asking intelligent questions. e) In some challenging material there is simply not enough time to do it justice. In those cases the best a teacher can do is do a non interactive session where they do a brain dump hoping that students will be motivated enough to follow up with the material in their own time. f) There is also the philosophical question about who gets to teach - 1) someone who is at the pinnacle of their field and hence can earn a livelihood by teaching people so that they can contribute with original research. 2) someone who is a great educator.

g) I think truly great teachers occur with the same frequency as truly great comics because both fields have something in common.

I had the misfortune of spending some time in a program like this and switched to fine art promptly. I think it's a copout to say that math is just "too hard". The problem is that engineering and math programs are poorly constructed and taught abysmally. These days I study math and engineering on the side because I can learn more effectively by reading books than sitting through 4 years of slog.

I can't help but agree. I went through a pretty grueling 4-year engineering program and felt very much the same. The only times I've actually enjoyed the experience was in project-based courses where I can actually go out and build.

The rest of engineering is just an endless series of lectures, tutorials, and labs, with little relation to reality. Even when the applicability is obvious, the crushing courseload of your typical engineering program means you can put little of it to real use.

In the end I decided my "education" was more important than "school", so I actively sought to minimize the impact of some courses (read: I skipped a lot of classes) so I can give myself time to, well, build things. And thank heavens for that - I could've ended up being just another clueless engineering grad. Head full of theories and zero experience applying any of it.

Funnily enough, generally speaking, the people who aced their way through an engineering program were also the ones that spent the least time building things, and at the end of the day are the last people I want working on my team. There are exceptions of course - insanely smart, superhuman people who were able to ace the courses and find time to apply it, but they are exceedingly rare. Whenever a company throws up some high "minimum GPA to be considered" on a job posting I have to chuckle. They are probably filtering out the best candidates.

My undergrad in EE is from Rose-Hulman where we spend most of our time focused on applying things to the real world. Every year except freshman, we worked on real projects from local companies, alumni, etc, etc. As a junior, I was assigned to a senior ME project because they needed some understanding from our area. I wasn't the only one drafted either. That term we spec'd out a new workflow for CDs returned to Columbia House (their main facility was in town).

I had a prof (that looked like Santa Claus) and told us point blank that the half life of our studies was about 3 years and that his goal wasn't to focus on the facts but to make sure that we learned how to learn.

Isn't that isomorphic to "math is hard" though?

I mean, look: math is hard. It takes a lot more mental effort to solve math problems than it does to read books and do research. That's not to say that insight and hard work aren't important in the humanties, but the barrier is lower. It just plain is.

If you're taking a class to learn about 16th century west african colonialism (or whatever other "serious" history class you want), you start at the top of the reading list and work your way through. If you hit a concept or fact you're unfamiliar with, you look it up in your other books or wikipedia.

At no point in that process do you stop and realize "Crap, I'm stuck." In math (and the numerate sciences more generally), that's the normal state of things.

Math is hard. I think we spend too much time lying to people and telling them that it's easy, and far too little time explaining how much fun it is.

Funny, my fear of being wrong is what led me to engineering. I didn't like the writing-based classes because I couldn't tell whether I was right before I let anyone else see my work.

I'm trying to get over that now.

My experience has been quite difference, but I suppose it's all relative based on what you're comparing it against. The amount of effort it takes to get an A/B in a liberal arts class and an A/B in a math/science class are lightyears apart. The liberal arts majors I knew would (maybe) do a couple hours of homework a night and party on the weekends. The engineering students would spent most of their nights doing homework or working in the labs, with more of the same on the weekends -- to get an equivalent grade. The classes that STEM majors need to pass are significantly harder than what liberal arts majors are up against and therefore require more work and effort.

It can be the opposite though. With Science, Engineering & Math, it's possible to get a 99 or 100, and isn't that difficult if you know you stuff. And once you know your stuff, you can stop studying because further effort has very steep diminishing returns.

On the other hand, it was pretty much impossible to get a grade above 89 in an English class. No essay is perfect, it's always possible to improve an essay, so a perfect grade was never given out.

I put in a lot less effort than my friends in humanities and received much better grades than them. Many of my friends in Engineering dropped out, but the ones who didn't received excellent grades.

I go to a fairly prestigious engineering school and it works the opposite way here. Math and science grades are always curved. You have no idea what grade you are going to get for the class until you get it. The grades you receive are more often than not more than you've earned. Either, the grading scale is lowered (90 and up is an A, 86-90 is A-, etc.) or your grade is boosted at the end. For example, I got a B in an organic chemistry class when it should have been a C-.

On the other hand, every humanities class I've taken, I've gotten the exact grade I have earned.

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