Psychology is not the easiest major, nor is it the most difficult. In the United States, Psychology is a liberal arts major and, like most such majors, presents a very different challenge to students than do natural science and engineering majors. In the liberal arts, students must absorb a great deal of knowledge that is usually not conceptually difficult. The challenge to the student is to learn the material and form a "cognitive map" of the theories, models, orientation, research, and history that allows her or him to have an intuitive understanding of the area. There is a lot of reading and a certain amount of memorizing. The "production skills" that are learned are writing and verbal reports. (In Psychology graduate school, additional skills are acquired in a specific area, for example performing psychotherapy.)
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Honors Convocation
Two of the students who received awards in the 2006 Spring Honors Convocation. These honors are given to students who excel both academically and in extracurricular activities. |
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On the other hand, in science and engineering, the material is conceptually very difficult but the amount of reading and the range of ideas one must be able to grasp is much lower. Engineering majors must learn to solve problems for which there is a limited set of correct answers, and the quality of the answer can be readily evaluated quantitatively.
Some high school students may make the assumption that Psychology must be very difficult at Florida Tech because so many of the majors on campus seem to involve dauntingly difficult material. In fact, there isn't much of a difference in this regard between Florida Tech and comparable departments in private colleges and universities. We do put all students through the calculus torture, but it's not the same class as the one taken by science students. ;-)
Nature of Psychology Index |
