![]() This is Parkinson’s law at work and it makes study time a noisy measure of difficulty. In other words, easier majors can afford to spend their time inefficiently because they have a lot of free time. But if you’ve ever walked across a college campus you know that group studying does involve a group, but little studying. To estimate the difficulty of a major we could just use weekly study hours, but there are several issues with this.įirst, time spent studying in a group is likely factored in. Study Hours Aren’t the Best Way to Measure Difficulty But in this article, we’re trying to see which majors are hardest. With whatever metric we use, STEM majors are more rigorous than non-STEM. So far I’ve shown that rigor is not equal across majors. This is in spite of non-STEM majors spending much less time studying than STEM majors. Finally, non-STEM majors tend to give out higher average GPAs than STEM majors.If grading standards across majors were the same, this wouldn’t happen (why would anyone do worse in courses they love?), since it does, it tells us biology courses are harder than non-STEM courses. One study shows that biology students get better grades in courses they take outside their own major, except in other STEM fields.These staggering differences in study time are consistent for all the years for which we have data. These differences are not trivial – over 4 years, this amounts to 800 more hours of study time. This is a 6 hour per week gap, in other words, the physics student studied about 50% more than the sociology student. In 2016, the average physics student studied 19 hours per week while the sociology student studied 13 hours per week. The National Survey of Student Engagement estimates weekly study time by major and consistently finds enormous differences.Are Some Majors Harder than Others?Īre some majors harder than others? And if so, how can we assess which are hard and which are easy?Īs for the first question, the evidence is strong that some majors really do require much more work than others. Then I rank 118 majors for difficulty based on millions of student ratings.įinally, I go over how a hard major differs from an easy one, and what all this means for what you should major in (hint – don’t pick an easy major). In this article, I cover how we can know that some majors are harder than others. ![]() ![]() Author’s Note: This article is based on a longer research paper. ![]()
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