You hit the nail on the head for my school.

But also, I feel like everyone here has to bust their asses for a B. Maybe it's just my curriculum, but if you have a 3.5 at my school, it's assumed you're either Jesus or sleeping with the professors.

Weeeeeell, I have personally written BS answers in biology classes when I was unsure of exactly what the question was asking and I earned generous partial credit. However, I teach General Chemistry now and I agree that USUALLY they either know a concept and get straight to the point or they don't know it and they make things up. However, you can show that you know the definition of a concept without knowing how to apply that knowledge and get partial credit.

Sounds like the humanities to me. :)

Yep and this is mostly based on the teachers/professors.

Yep. To me, too. :cool:

This is the new generation of science students. The "my mom/dad/grandma/cat told me I should be a doctor so I'm majoring in biology even though I barely understood high school bio" generation.

Getting a higher GPA is not the only perk of attending a private univesity.

If you attend a private university the less likely you'll have classmates (or *gasp* roommates) that wear lime green nail polish or wear backwards powder blue baseball caps. Where in the hell are state schools doing their recruiting these days?

Or, there's another explanation for why you're receiving the grades you're receiving. ;)

Also, across disciplines there's more grading leniency in graduate programs when departments get beyond the "gatekeeper" stage and focus on mentoring relationships, student retention and time to degree. The doctoral professor who was a hardass in your 1st and 2nd years won't necessarily be so once you've gotten to the "soon 2 be" years. ;)

That's it..you get partial credit. Like I said in my post, if you understand the concept, you can solve the problem. Knowing the definition and understanding the concept are two different things entirely which is why science is often hard for people. That is what separates good doctors from the bad ones in a lot of ways. As for BSing on your biology question, who knows...maybe you understood what they were getting at more than you thought. What does get less concrete in science is medicine- we do lots of things "just because we do."

Blame the previous generations.

Just like I blame the "everyone said the humanities is common sense and I can guess/bullshit my way through classes because every answer is the right answer unless the professor is a picky self-important bitch" generation on the older professors and college alum who directly or indirectly led younger generations to believe that.

Remind us of how that's different than the humanities. :)

Did I say anything about concepts and partial credit with the humanities? No. In what way does giving partial credit for a student knowing the definition of a concept not understanding the concept thus not getting full credit for the question go against the idea that science courses are more concrete than humanities courses in many ways? Are you giving style points because he used better vocabulary to define it? No. It is a concrete definition. It is a partial answer. Personally, most of my professors wouldn't have given any points, but no one said the sciences were immune to any grade padding. Whether or not grade inflation is worse in the humanities than science was the author of this articles assertion not mine. I simply proposed why I thought that might be.

The hardest part is that some are trying to weed out weak links while others are more nurturing. So my first semester, I had two nurturing professors who "only want to see students doing well" and now I have a hardass.

And not surprisingly, I am learning MUCH more from the hardass because I have to study harder!

This is different than previous how? There have always been a large number of science majors trying to go to medical school who don't understand that the 2.4 GPA just won't cut it.

But, remind me of how this is different than the humanities. Like I said before, what you experienced with those lenient teachers was just that. The same can be said for the teachers in the maths and nonsocial sciences.


Good.

You did more than that. You seemed to support and defend the assertion.

I can't type to the author, but I can type to you. :)

I do too. If you can get through a intro to philosophy course without being made to learn to differentiate between Plato and Aristotle, for instance, that is your professor's fault.

Similarly, if you can get through an Early British Lit course without being able to demonstrate that you can discuss and differentiate between Marlow and Shakespeare, then your teacher is not doing his/her job.

The ability to BS through any course is not a reflection of the rigor of the discipline or the objective/subjective criteria on which students are evaluated across disciplines. It is a reflection of poor instruction, and that does a disservice to the students.

To be clear, I am not talking about sliding by with a C (it's pretty easy to slide by with a "passing" grade in most courses), I am talking about excelling.

LMAO.

most of the kids i knew in liberal arts in undergrad dropped out of engineering school.

Because engineering requires a special kind of person with the ability to entertain him or herself. :D

LMAO!

palmetta and fistina are my best friends.

There's so much wrong with this. LOL.

As it should be. A 3.5 is HONORS...I think people forget that sometimes. I see some of the GPAs that the greek chapters have at some schools and think, "No way is half of the chapter a college honors student." 3.5 and up is supposed to be reserved for the few who really stand out, and when a third/quarter of the class is graduating with honors that makes me roll my eyes.

As someone who came from the Liberal Arts & Social Sciences, and is living in the College of Science now, I find it fascinating to watch the hard science people struggle with concepts that are more subjective, or dare I say "ambiguous." There's a class project we're doing, and the science and facts of these people, A+, the ability to integrate it with culture and reality, not so much (for some, F-). One of my classmates was so angry with statistics because it wasn't concrete enough for her, and I operate within that framework so well I just didn't understand what her problem was if she's capable of calculus and above. Perhaps some of it comes from attending college in the post (post) modern era, but I can fully accept that a) my hypothesis is based off the best information I have at this point, and it is likely to change and b) I will never know or understand everything, and I can accept that, and so will my peers.

Yay post post processual archaeology, and kooky people like Ian Hodder and Shanks & Tilley.

This is why I still say that Sociological Theory was one of the hardest classes I took in college. Not that physics and human anatomy and physiology weren't, but I was surprised at how hard it was. I was pre-med my first two years, then switched to PR and minored in sociology (so, from a BS to a BA). Both majors had very hard classes, but naturally for very different reasons. Early pre-med studies are basically all about memorization, and you better get it down quick. But sociological theory and communications theory pound you to death with question after question...the type where the answer is another question - and then you have to write about it!