As the Wall Street Journal reports*, The National Bureau of Economic Research has put its top men on the case to discover why Math and Science departments at universities around the country are suffering from higher dropout rates than their liberal art counter parts.
Doctors Ralph and Todd R. Stinebrickner have read the tea leaves and the results may shock you: Students don’t like failing classes. Todd R. explains the phenomena, “Students knew science was hard to begin with, but for a lot of them it turned out to be much worse than what they expected…What they didn’t expect is that even if they work hard, they still won’t do well.”
We can’t all be genius janitors, hell I am writing an blog article at this very moment, so I probably definitely have little room for criticism, but the experiment synapsis reads like an article on The Onion. Over the course of two Falls in 2000 and 2001 these two doctors surveyed 655 students 12 times a year about their academic majors. Fifteen years** (time presumably used poring over the data, and analyzing complex metrics) later, the Stinebrickners conclude that math is hard.
*In 2013
**Probably more like Thirteen Years, as the paper was published in 2014, its just barely 2015. Hyperbole though.
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