I may be biased on this issue, based on personal experience. But it seems to me that someone teaching English Literature is unlikely to be inclined to fail you, or even give you a low mark, if you’re at least making a concerted effort. The idea that professors fail you for ideological differences is conceivable, and probably more prominent at lower-quality institutions. I’ve disagreed very strongly with professor’s views before without it harming my grade, so long as able to state the grounds articulately. If you do have a professor with a clear bent, it’s usually pretty easy to figure out what they want to hear and thus easy to get a good grade. I just think that because it’s so much easier to be clearly wrong in harder subject matter, it’s more tempting for professors to set a higher bar for a good grade. People who teach softer subjects are simply less concerned about right and wrong, and thus less inclined to punish people who make any kind of effort.
I can envision someone from LW writing a humanities paper that unintentionally raises red flags, leading to either a poor grade or an ugly disciplinary action, while it’s hard to think of how that would happen in a quantitative course (except for in personal interactions with other students, but that’s a danger either way.)
That sort of disaster is quite unlikely, but not entirely negligible. However, I tend to think the benefits of a humanities course in a topic of interest can vastly outweigh this sort of concern.
I did rather poorly in an ethics class because I realized moral relativism was rather obviously right and any form of realism logically indefensible (without an axiom—if you admit you have an unprovable assumption underlying your moral framework, then it’s morally real-ish, but it isn’t totally objectively correct, because of that assumption). There is also a real risk of relying on concepts that the reader is not familiar with, but that’s usually pretty easy to screen, especially if you have a friend to read a draft.
The thing is, when I say, “rather poorly,” I mean a B (possibly +), and this was at a top public university. In a math class (having not taken math in five years), I realized shortly before an exam that I had been taking derivatives when I should have been integrating. This would have had a rather more pronounced effect on my grade had I not caught it.
I may be biased on this issue, based on personal experience. But it seems to me that someone teaching English Literature is unlikely to be inclined to fail you, or even give you a low mark, if you’re at least making a concerted effort. The idea that professors fail you for ideological differences is conceivable, and probably more prominent at lower-quality institutions. I’ve disagreed very strongly with professor’s views before without it harming my grade, so long as able to state the grounds articulately. If you do have a professor with a clear bent, it’s usually pretty easy to figure out what they want to hear and thus easy to get a good grade. I just think that because it’s so much easier to be clearly wrong in harder subject matter, it’s more tempting for professors to set a higher bar for a good grade. People who teach softer subjects are simply less concerned about right and wrong, and thus less inclined to punish people who make any kind of effort.
I can envision someone from LW writing a humanities paper that unintentionally raises red flags, leading to either a poor grade or an ugly disciplinary action, while it’s hard to think of how that would happen in a quantitative course (except for in personal interactions with other students, but that’s a danger either way.)
That sort of disaster is quite unlikely, but not entirely negligible. However, I tend to think the benefits of a humanities course in a topic of interest can vastly outweigh this sort of concern.
I did rather poorly in an ethics class because I realized moral relativism was rather obviously right and any form of realism logically indefensible (without an axiom—if you admit you have an unprovable assumption underlying your moral framework, then it’s morally real-ish, but it isn’t totally objectively correct, because of that assumption). There is also a real risk of relying on concepts that the reader is not familiar with, but that’s usually pretty easy to screen, especially if you have a friend to read a draft.
The thing is, when I say, “rather poorly,” I mean a B (possibly +), and this was at a top public university. In a math class (having not taken math in five years), I realized shortly before an exam that I had been taking derivatives when I should have been integrating. This would have had a rather more pronounced effect on my grade had I not caught it.