Is Philosophy easy?

Some exams are harder than others.

"There was also a concern in sociology that too much credit could be given for common sense responses. The report said: "In the case of psychology and biology, the question papers made use of complex concepts. Candidates could neither infer nor guess answers."

It continued: "This was not clearly the case in sociology."

[...]

A fourth study comparing English literature, history and media studies A-levels found [...] little difference between the subjects at grade A at AS.

At grade E, however, media studies candidates were considered to be less impressive than those doing English, with history candidates falling somewhere in between."

The grade inflation debate is often interesting (one particuarly interesting piece on it is here). I tend to think that the suggestions above capture something pretty close to the truth.

Stereotypically "softer" subjects - sociology, philosophy, psychology, geography, media studes, and to a lesser degree the other humanities - probably really are easier to achieve the lower grades on. It's much harder to write an essay that offers absolutely nothing intelligible on, say, the existence of God[1], than it is to write an exam paper that gets the numbers universally wrong. But standards at the upper end are just as high, precisely because distinguishing your essay from the crowd is difficult when mere common-sense and the ability to write a coherent sentence is already half the marks.

At my previous university there were moves to change the grading system. But it wasn't - as you might imagine from the general tone of news stories - a change to make the humanitites system more similar to the sciences, but the reverse. The sciences traditionally had far more fails and 3rds, but also far more 1sts[2]. Humanitites students, in contrast, almost universally get 2:2's and 2:1's. The university was introducing new examination system for the sciences, where an easier paper could only you get up to a 2:2 or so, and a much harder advanced paper was responsible for how far you went upwards from there. I wonder if we'll see outcry when that change has its impact, and science failures drop drastically. But of course, I also wonder if such outcries will ignore any corresponding drops in the top grades?

[1] "I haven't seen him", with a bit of padding, probably secures a few marks.

[2] One reason for this was that marks were capped at 80% for humanitites (and I never saw anyone get much more than 74%). No such cap existed in the sciences. This meant that 100% in one exam (by no means impossible) could really make up for a second bad exam in a way that you couldn't in the humanities.