@Canuckguy : Yes, I remember old charts that would show social sciences awfully close in study time to natural sciences. Also, I remember something like natural sciences having lower grades than engineering. This may be because engineering courses have more project based learning and not just high stakes exams and quizzes.
Also, I thought that econ. was supposed to be hard (though at Duke, especially in the last decade more so than many others). Emory has always had a struggling econ. dept (thank you b-school for getting too much shine) since it separated from GBS and over the years had become really easy (perhaps to preserve or increase number of majors) and I always had a feeling it was an anomaly among schools. Then suddenly like 3 years ago they were apparently reprimanded and next you know it a Princeton-style grading distribution had been suggested to faculty: http://economics.emory.edu/home/undergraduate/major_minor_requirements.html . Actually its harsher because it prescribes the range of B’s and C’s (the business school uses the same distribution but only for core courses which are actually few). In addition, it appears many students are saying that instructors who were not writing difficult exams before (including some of the highest quality and most revered instructors) are now writing exams with averages on par or lower than many more challenging science instructors (talking 75 and lower). I suppose this makes sense because you wouldn’t want to give easy exams and then curve downward. Better to challenge them and then fit the grades to the distribution.
In addition, it seems like they are intentionally placing certain difficult instructors for certain courses to ultimately function as weed out and this was apparently non-existent before. My guess is it is looking more and more like a normal econ. department. Their attempt to compete with the business school seems to have gotten them some attention and it has now been reversed. The other day a friend (who is a rising junior) explained to me how he tried to double major with biology, took a couple of classes under the new econ. regiment and is now deterred because they were far more intense than he anticipated (his brother had easily double majored) and would take away time from his science courses which can’t happen because he’s pre-med. Also, the next courses in line for him are those with weedout instructors like econ. stats. Kind of funny they turned easier to compete with the b-school given the reputation UG business programs have when it comes to rigor with the overall curriculum of certain concentrations being questionable to academics and even those who teach them:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/education/edlife/edl-17business-t.html?_r=0 . Business schools used to report study times among the lowest.