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<p>That is a sad fact that very well may be true. I have a friend who couldn’t even get through pre-algebra easily and then thought he was going to go to college for business. Yeah… right.</p>
<p>I believe the general difficulty order that most people agree on from hard to harder is </p>
<p>Industrial
Civil/Env/Arch
Mech/Aero/Biomed
Chem
EE</p>
<p>This is at the undergraduate level at least. At the graduate and PhD level it can probably all be lumped into the category of really freakin hard.</p>
<p>this order is probably correct when I was going to school decades ago, with the exception that ChE would be harder, by far, than EE…</p>
<p>I understand that it has changed now.</p>
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Are you claiming there isn’t average ability differences at the macro level between majors? That seems like quite a stretch.</p>
<p>EECS @ Berkeley vs CivE?</p>
<p>If one major is harder at an institution, it is because there are better students in it.</p>
<p>I guess it’s possible there’s one field of engineering that attracts more of the brightest students. But that doesn’t make the material any harder or easier, just different. Any subject can be arbitrarily hard, in the sense that you can find interesting questions which have not been answered in any discipline you can imagine.</p>
<p>While I would agree that the average EE student is typically intellectually smarter, that same student often lacks many other skills that the average ME or CivE student has: people skills, building and repairing things, management skills, etc. There’s also the fact that harder doesn’t mean better. Why pick a major based on how hard it is unless you just want to inflate your ego. It seems like too many students want to validate their choice of major with its difficulty.</p>
<p>^^ pretty unreasonable claim…I don’t see how an ME would be any better/worse than an EE at people skills, building things, management skills, repairing things? oh god engineer with a tool, run people : )</p>
<p>I’m talking about innate skills of the average student, not the skills the student learns during school. An incoming CivE student is much more likely to enjoy building things and home craftsmanship, just like an incoming EE student is much more likely to be gifted with fiddling around with electronics and ME students are probably obsessed about their cars. From everything I’ve seen, average EE students typically don’t have the same level of people skills as average CivEs and MEs. Of course there are EEs with great people skills just like there are CivEs who are lightyears smarter than most EEs. I’m just talking about the average student.</p>
<p>ohh i see, yea that’s true</p>
<p>Which is far different from “communication skills”. I’ve seen no reason to think that IQ has a negative correlation to communication skills. In fact I think IQ generally has a positive correlation with communication skills.</p>
<p>IQ doesn’t have a correlation to anything. It is almost completely useless as a measure of intelligence. You can’t accurately characterize such a complex concept with a single number.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say it’s completely useless. It measures something… good IQ tests are supposed to be pretty reliable, anyway. Validity is always up to debate but I think there are IQ ranges where it is a decent metric.</p>
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IQ correlates with a huge amount of things. If it didn’t, no one would reference it.</p>
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Maybe, there is no other better measure of intelligence that is quickly administered.</p>
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Yes. You. Can.</p>
<p>You lose accuracy, but comparing the mental capabilities of people two standard deviations apart in IQ shows just how powerful this number is in evaluating intelligence.</p>
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<p>That is one large logical fallacy. If drugs were bad for you, no one would use them, right?</p>
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<p>I suppose you subscribe to the idea that the US News rankings are infallible too, right? How do you account for people who are just poor test-takers but are actually very intelligent? What about different types of intelligence? Honestly, it really isn’t that good of a measure. You can get some very rough empirical data from it at time, but you can’t really draw too many strong conclusions like a lot of people do.</p>
<p>There is a pretty good book I once read about the attempt in the 19th and 20th centuries to quantify intelligence. It has some pretty cool stuff in there.</p>
<p>[Amazon.com:</a> The Mismeasure of Man (9780393314250): Stephen Jay Gould: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Mismeasure-Man-Stephen-Jay-Gould/dp/0393314251/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273020040&sr=8-1]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Mismeasure-Man-Stephen-Jay-Gould/dp/0393314251/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273020040&sr=8-1)</p>
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<p>Sorry to butt in, but who references it? Do people put it on their resumes? When people are applying to jobs do they tell them their IQ score? When people are applying to grad school do they tell the department they are applying to their IQ score?</p>
<p>If an IQ score was that valuable of a metric, it would be more commonly referenced.</p>
<p>It’s pretty unreasonable to say that IQ tests are completely useless because they might be a little flawed. I mean, what isn’t? There are other ways of demonstrating intelligence besides IQ tests for those who may not do well on IQ tests for other reasons. Good IQ tests even try to ascertain the extent to which external factors contribute to variations in performance, and are probably designed in such a way as to minimize such factors.</p>
<p>IQ tests were designed to measure mental retardation in individuals. Beyond that, they serve little purpose other than to increase the size of person’s *****/breasts.</p>
<p>Socioeconomic status (read: poverty) has a larger impact on intelligence followed by genetics. If you are poor, you have little to no access to education; if you are rich, you may be able to even hire a private tutor that will provide you with individualized, special attention.</p>
<p>IQ does not matter much. It is not a good predictor of success (whatever success might be).</p>
<p>I see that a substantial number of people on CC prefer Mr. Rogers to peer-reviewed science. Hilarious.</p>
<p>Fred Rogers was a saint!</p>
<p>Seriously though, I don’t get the connection between him or his neighborhood and science. Unless of course you want a tour of a crayon factory. That was my favorite.</p>
<p>^ Unless he meant Carl Rogers, with all of his psychology and such…</p>