Re:AP Classes Are a Scam
by mjn on Wednesday October 17, 2012 @09:40AM
(#4664324)
> In STEM fields, anyway. Freshmen distribution survey courses don't do much to prepare you for anything particular, even at Yale.
I actually found my humanities requirements the most useful of my intro courses, as a CS major, outside the actual CS courses themselves. The required physics and chem classes were intellectually interesting and perhaps useful for understanding the world, but I've never really used them in my work.
On the other hand, my philosophy classes taught me how to write long-form scholarly essays, which construct and refute arguments and cite the literature as appropriate. In my current career as a CS academic, that's a quite core part of my job, and is something I didn't learn at all from my STEM courses. I'm glad I wasn't able to test out of those, because we sure didn't learn how to do that in high school AP English!
I actually found my humanities requirements the most useful of my intro courses, as a CS major, outside the actual CS courses themselves. The required physics and chem classes were intellectually interesting and perhaps useful for understanding the world, but I've never really used them in my work.
On the other hand, my philosophy classes taught me how to write long-form scholarly essays, which construct and refute arguments and cite the literature as appropriate. In my current career as a CS academic, that's a quite core part of my job, and is something I didn't learn at all from my STEM courses. I'm glad I wasn't able to test out of those, because we sure didn't learn how to do that in high school AP English!