And let’s face it - the people who are patting themselves on the back for how Very Smart and Hardworking they are which is Only Found in STEM would fall flat on their faces if they had to write advertising campaigns, interpret French literature or do anything remotely dealing with people.
But I can see it’s important to Sylvan, so here you go: Sylvan, by dint of being in STEM, you are unequivocally the smartest and hardest working person in the world. Congratulations! You won the contest!
I’m still amused by the idea that you are being PC, PG 
@sylvan8798 I don’t understand the reluctance to recognize that fields outside of STEM have their own significant levels of challenge.
Equally I know STEM people with amazing people skills. A close friend with her PhD in math has some pretty amazing Latin skills.
Not everyone fits in a box, probably far fewer than any stereotypes suggest.
It’s easy to understand the reluctance. What if someone else had skills you didn’t have? Much better to pretend those skills are either easy-peasy or completely irrelevant than to admit you’re not All That.
I used to look down on the communications majors from my lofty perch in econ and math. And then I grew up, entered a field where those skills were important, and realized they knew stuff I didn’t. Sure, Sylvan, you could head crisis management at a PR firm, or testify effectively before Congress, or negotiate a multi million deal, or run a chain of restaurants, or write a column for the NYT or WSJ, or do any one of a number of things that aren’t STEM. Uh-huh. It kind of begs the question- if those things are so easy and you could do them with one hand tied behind your back what’s so smart about taking the hard path? Because you know any idiot with a beating heart could do those other things. Right?
^You’re totally missing the point Pg. No one is suggesting that other fields don’t have set-backs or require difficult skills or abilities. Where has anyone said that? But if anyone says STEM this-or-that, you immediately jump up and yell about how other fields have the same issues and all fields are the same. Yes, other fields have smart people, setbacks, require talents and all that, but that does not mean that STEM fields DON’T or that there are not issues which are unique to one field or another.
Everyone has skills that I don’t have. In fact I don’t have ANY skills whatsoever, so even rocks have skills I don’t have. I could never do any of those things you mention, or any other things actually, since I am brain dead. Please continue to list the things I can’t do - it will fill the universe with your joyous words.
Can posters have a discussion about issues relevant to STEM fields (as well as all the others) without you feeling the need to jump in and defend all the others?
"No one is suggesting that other fields don’t have set-backs or require difficult skills or abilities. Where has anyone said that? ".
When someone explicitly talked about those setbacks as if they were unique to STEM and I inquired why the belief that they were unique to STEM fields and you chimed in that “oh, all majors and all fields are the same, the PC police said so.”
Regarding the engineering/CS majors having higher grades/scores in every field and thus, being the strongest students/applicants, that’s not necessarily true across the board…especially if one goes back only a couple of decades.
For instance, up until the end of the '90s, this wasn’t the case at Columbia University on average.
The students with the highest GPAs and SATs in both areas tended to be drawn to Columbia College…their Arts & Sciences division whereas one could be admitted to Columbia SEAS with lower SATs so long as one had strong/near maxed out math scores and demonstrated topflight lopsided performance in STEM classes.
Many HS classmates and older alums confirmed the '90s era HS handbook’s statistics that one can get admitted with a HS GPA which would have gotten one flatly rejected from schools like NYU-Stern, SUNY-Binghamton(90/-A GPA cutoff), Middlebury*, Barnard, Vassar if female, etc.
The existence of this relatively lower admissions requirement for Columbia SEAS if one was lopsided in favor of STEM was such many students who’d have otherwise been shut out of elite/respectable colleges or even some in-state publics like Binghamton due to not meeting GPA cutoffs or having strong SAT verbal scores were admitted to Columbia SEAS in droves during my HS years and earlier.
And because transferring between the undergrad divisions up until the end of the '90s only required one year in good academic standing of taking mostly/all gen ed classes and pro forma administrative paperwork, many students with lopsided strengths in STEM areas…especially those from STEM-centered public magnets like BxScience, Stuyvesant, etc exploited this as an easy backdoor to eventually transfer into and graduate from what was regarded as the more prestigious Columbia College. This phenomenon is one likely reason why Columbia U changed this policy sometime in the early '00s to close this loophole.
Just wanted to add this as an exception to the engineering/CS students are on average, among the strongest students in a given college’s admissions pool.
- One of my best HS buddies was admitted to Midd with a bare 88 which he attributed solely to an outstanding interview and essay as his GPA/SAT stats were such he agreed with his GC that by rights Midd was in her words "Mission: Impossible." .
If the existence of additional scholarships for high stat engineering frosh at the University of Alabama is any indication (i.e. that the University of Alabama feels that it needs to offer extra scholarship money to entice engineering students than it does to entice other students), it may also be the case today at some schools that the engineering students are not necessarily stronger than other students.
I really did not read that into QuantMech’s statement.
Is it better if she says:
?
She’s speaking from her own experience and observations, but I don’t see that she is saying it only applies to her own field. Would she really encourage a student to pursue law solely on the grounds on future employment prospects if they did not love the field? A lawyer or a doctor might well say the same thing regarding law or medicine, while not meaning to exclude everyone else from that advice.
Time to pop some popcorn and pull up a chair??
I read QM’s post the same way PG did (and your response as well, sylvan), that such setbacks and ego blows are unique to STEM.
Of course we can only speak from our own experience, that goes without saying. Well, unless we have cousins.
@Pizzagirl “And let’s face it - the people who are patting themselves on the back for how Very Smart and Hardworking they are which is Only Found in STEM would fall flat on their faces if they had to write advertising campaigns, interpret French literature or do anything remotely dealing with people.”
Wow. Talk about stereotyping. STEM majors can’t write? STEM majors can’t read French? STEM majors can’t deal with people? You do love to be provocative! Want to share your views on any other groups? Maybe you should run for President, PG! Very funny. lol
^I don’t know why you would read it that way, I hardly think that’s what QM intended.
No, much2learn. I didn’t say “STEM majors can’t do anything else.” I said that those people who need to pat themselves on the back about their own brilliance which is only found in STEM likely can’t do anything else. That’s a subset of STEM majors.
Don’t forget - I was a math major. And I have never seen such arrogance about the alleged superiority of STEM (people or field) as I have on CC.
None of this explains to me why there need to be STEM classes where only x% of students can get A’s.
Do ALL colleges grade this way, or can students who are flunked out of Sylvan’s school enroll in an ABET accredited program that doesn’t grade this way? Those students would be engineers when they graduate. Would they earn less than the engineers who graduate from programs that use a grading system like Sylvan’s college? Or does every single engineering program in the US use that grading system?
Whew - back to something close to the original question. Yay!
Exactly. There’s still no explanation as to why grades need to be curved to provide an arbitrary limit on the number of A’s. “STEM is special and different somehow” seems to be the only rationale.
I don’t think anyone is talking about curving to limit the number of A’s.
The phrase curving is being used without making definitions. I’ve been sloppy with my use of the word curve; perhaps normalizing would be a better word choice.
Typically what happens, at least in the situations I’ve seen, is that, on a test with a low average score, an equal number of points are added to everyone’s test to bring the test in line with something that matches the “typical” 65-100 D-A standards. For example, on test with an average of 50 everyone might get a bump of 25 or 30 points.
If there was a “limit” being placed on the number of A’s that would be more a changing of the variance of the test by assigning a different “curve” to different grades.
I don’t actually object to the curve… I object to tests where almost everyone gets a very low score. It is so frustrating to students to be presented with test materials that pretty much no one in the class can do, and too many of them internalize that lesson to think they suck at the subject. And so far I haven’t heard any good reasons of why the EXAM has to be the place where students meet these problems that are apparently more difficult than they are seeing in the homework and in examples given in the exam.