Are science degrees considered harder than humanities/arts degrees?

[LoniceraJaponica]

DD has been deiscussing with her boyfriend that the degree she wants to do (biomedical science) has a lot of contact hours (upwards of 21 hours a week dependig on where she goes).

He has been crowing that he will have about 9 or 10 hours a week (history). Obviously there is lab work to take into consideration for DD, and both degrees rely on a lot of self study. Is the BF deluded that he is going to have a much easier ride?

We did 40 hours contact a week for the first 2 years. We used to mock arts degrees as they did around 15 contact hours at the start which we couldn’t understand. This is over 30 years ago so not sure if still relevant.

40 hours was nothing. It’s just like a full time job then you go home and hit the books. Here it was rare to live at college so most people lived at home where realistically meals appeared on the table for you and you had clean laundry magically appear in your cupboard. Those in college were well looked after also and were fed but they (horror) had to do their own washing.

A lot of us also worked night shifts in nursing homes as well (no quals needed back in those days any randoms would do and students willing to work night shift were a god send). 90% of the time they were all soundly sleeping and there was nothing to do so we took it as an opportunity to hit the books and took it in turns putting our head on the desk and sleeping. There was the odd night wanderer but persistent night wanderers were routinely medicated to help them sleep and stop that problem. Obviously if there was something to be done we happily did it as that’s what we were there for.

The whole thing set us up well for a few years down the track where we would work for 72 hour stretches at a time often lucky to get 8hrs off before starting again. So 40 hrs contact a week was nothing in the scheme of life. No idea what the people with 15 hrs did, just as mystified now as we were back then really.

DD visited a university yesterday where she was told that there would be 30 contact hours a week, plus self study. Given that she is still under the CFS team I hope she will be able to cope. This university was her favourite BTW.

I think part of the problem is we specialise way too early in the UK.

England. I'm Scottish and here pupils do a mix of subjects at Highers (I did Art and Design, Biology, Chemistry, English, History, Maths and Physics) and then get admitted to a faculty at University rather than a degree course, it's possible to do first and second year courses from another faculty. So at Uni my brother studied maths, physics and philosophy in his first year.

And I absolutely agree doing a range of subjects develops transferable skills. Having to write multiple essays for Higher history at school helped a lot when I had to write multiple essays for my biochemistry degree.

I think there's a false dichotomy... STEM disciplines absolutely require analytical skills and being able to work through data from many sources.

This, but I think so many people in England don't do any STEM post 16 they don't understand what practicing science is actually like, they have never done original research and never had to assess the quality of someone else's work and decide if it's meaningful. Which is why we then get things like vaccine scares, no critical assessment of what the papers tell them about science.

"And I absolutely agree doing a range of subjects develops transferable skills. Having to write multiple essays for Higher history at school helped a lot when I had to write multiple essays for my biochemistry degree"

I agree. DD did psychology to AS level and geography to A level, so hopefully this will help. Interestingly, Hull York medical school actually prefer their students to have taken 2 sciences and a humanities or arts A level rather than 3 sciences as it shows a breadth of education.

Agree with breadth of subjects being valuable. Ds took the ib which requires 6 subjects and he wrote his extended essay on Jekyll and Hyde and Frankenstein which is useful prep for any essay writing.