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<p>It’s more difficult due to the way the course is set up, not due to the difficulty of the material or the skills required. Put all science majors in small class sizes and I bet the test scores would rise.</p>
<p>Regarding [Why</a> Economics?](<a href=“http://www.shsu.edu/~eco_www/program/whyeconomics.htm]Why”>http://www.shsu.edu/~eco_www/program/whyeconomics.htm)…</p>
<p>If you’ve spent four years as a science major, you’re accustomed to being graded on a test format. Then, it’s not at all surprising to expect to get higher scores on graduate school exams. If the GMAT, the GRE, and the LSAT required test-takers to write a 30-page analytical paper in 1 month, I suspect you’d see that table turned upside-down. </p>
<p>I think the MCAT is a better test to look at. After all, everyone who takes the MCAT has at least some science background and therefore some recent familiarity with being scored based on an exam. This is opposed to a test like the LSAT, which presumably you could take without being accustomed to test-taking during your college career. Unfortunately, the most recent data where MCAT scores are broken down by major is 1999, but that’s no older than the data provided in [Why</a> Economics?](<a href=“http://www.shsu.edu/~eco_www/program/whyeconomics.htm]Why”>http://www.shsu.edu/~eco_www/program/whyeconomics.htm). What’s interesting is that “humanities” majors do as well as or even better than their “biological sciences,” “mathematics/statistics,” and “physical sciences” major counterparts. This suggests that, at least for the MCAT, it’s familiarity with being graded based on an exam that’s the issue, not the lesser “critical thinking skills and logic” of humanities majors.</p>
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<p>I doubt it. As I said before, science courses are set up in such a way as to be more difficult. The material is not harder.</p>
<p>Science majors place more emphasis on testing, not intellectual challenge. I think that convincing arguments could be made for humanities majors being more intellectually demanding than science majors. As I see it, humanities majors are looking at questions with no clear-cut answers while science majors are trying to prove that they understand how to solve a certain equation discovered and understood 100 years ago. For a midterm paper, a humanities major might write a paper describing subtle references to life and death in the plants described in Homer’s “Odyssey.” For a midterm exam in Physical Chemistry, I’d have to use the wave function to come up with an equation for momentum or use another equation to show that protons were bosons and not fermions - it was a lot of “figure out which equation to use and plug stuff in.” I’d say the paper-writing required a lot more thought, research, and logic than memorizing equations and how to use them.</p>
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<p>Using that book to argue with me is unfair. Since I have no access to this book, I can’t refute this statement. Not because I’m inherently too illogical to do so, but because the Internet is not set up in such a way that I can read this book and find that quote for myself. :D</p>
<p>I must say that I expect that there are lots of articles written to refute that book, since a quick glance at Amazon seems to indicate that it’s quite controversial.</p>
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<p>You’ve only named the famous science geniuses. To your genius list, I add Beethoven, Orson Welles, Raphael, James Joyce, Homer, Jimmy Hendrix, and Marilyn vos Savant. There, now the list of non-science geniuses is now longer as the list of science geniuses. So there are more non-science geniuses than science ones!</p>
<p>You’d have to find all the geniuses in history and examine their contributions to society before declaring that most geniuses are in science. Just naming the best-known science ones doesn’t count.</p>