<p>I’m an honors engineering student, and when they gave me my schedule, they had placed me in three honors level courses. They said they were the honors equivalent of the courses all engineering students were taking fall semester. How hard are these courses going to be? I’m nervous. In general, how much harder are honors courses?</p>
<p>Honors courses are not designed to be harder but rather smaller (although not always necessarily the case). Although, the professor knows they’re teaching an honors section, so they may have higher expectations (even if they don’t admit it).</p>
<p>Blinkangel, can you tell me what the workload is like in Voices of Development? My son does not need to take freshman English and wants to get his Comparative Cultures core out of the way. He got information at orientation that said for this class “students will write book reviews and a larger essay that compares and contrasts each of these development leaders.” How long are these papers? Son is a CS/Game Design major who does not like to write, though he is a fine writer. Right now he is enrolled in East Asian Studies, but I would like for him to take one of these Inquiry classes while he has a chance (he has no electives next semester).</p>
<p>I didn’t take Voices in Development (I don’t think it was offered my freshman year). I took Social Entrepreneurship (Voices in Development counts as SE if he decides to pursue the SE minor). This is his only chance to take Voices in Development since it’s only offered to honors freshmen (and only in the fall semester). </p>
<p>The professor is a business professor, but he understands that not all his students are business students. In SE, the shorter papers we wrote were 4-5 pages while the longer research paper was 8-12 papers. But he usually emphasizes that there is no absolute minimum/maximum length and that he just wants you to write enough to answer the question-- not add any fluff to expand the paper. </p>
<p>I highly recommend taking the Inquiry course. SE has really led me down a new potential career path. (As long as he is at least somewhat interested in the topic.)</p>
<p>Besides, learning to write a pretty big part of college. There were plenty of people who APed out of english so they didn’t take a single class that required writing until their Advanced Writing class- where they bombed and hated it and complained about every single word they had to type. The classes I’ve taken that have required essays (like 10 pages, not just easy 3 page stuff), I’ve really enjoyed the topics. I wrote three of my Advanced Writing papers on a particular topic that I now want to concentrate my career on.</p>
<p>Thank you both for your replies. Neuchimie, I agree that ds should be learning to write in college. I just don’t want a class that requires a lot of writing to be something I talked him into, rather than something he chose himself. I also think he will find it challenging that first semester balancing his work and social life and don’t want him to take on too much.</p>
<p>As far as honors courses being harder, his orientation group was told that honors Fundamentals of Computer Science is a hard course, but they could easily drop down to the regular course after a couple weeks if they found it too difficult.</p>
<p>Not all honors courses are harder, but some definitely are. I took an honors seminar where I watched a movie, made a presentation on it, and wrote an essay about it. One of the best classes I’ve taken (because of the discussions), but also one of the easiest. In this case, the fact that honors classes- especially seminars- are usually smaller was the best part.</p>
<p>However they started offering Fundies 1 as honors I believe two years ago, and it is now known for being a very tough class. A lot of people drop to the regular level. To be fair to the class and professor, I felt that (when I took Fundies) most students didn’t actually bother putting in the effort to do the assignments completely, so they didn’t understand basic concepts well, and then they bombed when we got to the slightly more complicated stuff. But even so, the honors one is harder. </p>
<p>Just a note about computer science, it is a very hard major. Harder than most people think it is. We’re talking several nights where the entire night is just spent on homework, and not because they left something to the last minute. A lot of people (mainly guys) I know choose it because they were good at math so they figured they’d be good at computer science. I’m sure anyone who puts some effort into it can do very well, just try to make sure your son doesn’t think it’ll be really easy just because he’s good at Microsoft Excel or something.</p>
<p>There is also a game design club on campus that meets in Ryder sometimes. They bring speakers in from places, I believe. Also, if game design majors have to take art classes (I know multimedia does, but not sure about game design), do NOT take them in a very tough semester. Art classes take up the most time out of any class I’ve every seen, except perhaps Architecture. Plus they usually come with several-hour-long labs. A friend took Art 2D and he spent 13 hours straight painting a huge blown up picture of his face, which did not include the hours of mixing the paints, blowing up the image, and drawing the picture.</p>