TIME magazine's cover article "Is America flunking science?"

sakky
Tue, 14 Feb 2006 17:41:38 +0000

Sure there aren’t many INCENTIVES to study science right now but there aren’t any major DETERRENTS, either. People with intense interests in science and engineering aren’t being turned away from the field right now due to financial implausibility, most everyone I know here loves what they study and haven’t given much thought to future salaries. I mean sure, if you want to offer us heaps of money upon graduation we’ll stick out our hands and gladly take it, but we are and we would be here regardless.



Actually, yeah, there is a major deterrant to studying science and engineering. It’s not financial. It’s the simple sheer difficulty of science/engineering, particularly the GRADING of it.

The truth is, science/engineering courses tend to assign more work and grade harder than do other courses. People see that and they are confronted with a choice - do they really want to work harder than their peers will work, or not? Which then leads to the natural question of what benefit they will get out of doing that extra work. If the answer is “not much benefit”, then rational players will simply conclude that they shouldn’t major in science/engineering because the benefit is not worth the extra work. The fall of Communism has taught us that people don’t just work hard just to work hard, they have to be given incentives to work hard. If those incentives are weak, then less people are going to work hard.

Hence, I would say that one of the major ways to get more people to major in science/engineering is to simply lighten up on the grading, or make the grading of nonscience courses harder. I have always been a proponent of ‘grading reform’ - that is, equalizing the grading schemes used by science and non-science departments.