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Originally Posted by Ikari  They don't. You won't come across a high level hard science or math class which doesn't have homework. Not in undergrad and not in graduate school; it doesn't happen that way. Perchance it's different than law since you just have to read case studies and past judgments and such past some base learning of the law. But in the sciences, math, and engineering that isn't going to work because we aren't taught specifics. We learn basics, the fundamental laws and problem solving techniques to allow us to solve problems we've never seen before. It takes time to master this and to fully understand this, and homework is essential to getting this down. I wouldn't want to take a graduate level course that didn't have homework because the tests (at least by some professors) aren't designed to be passable. |
That's quite possible, my experiences with hard sciences are somewhat limited.
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While there may be subjects that can allow you to get by without homework or by slacking off the majority of the time; it's not true for all subjects. The more rigorous subjects will normally require some amount of homework so that the professors and students get feedback about performance.
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Again, my point isn't that you can slack off or not do the reading. The point is that in many subjects, I don't think that being forced to physically turn in homework is as worthwhile as being assigned reading to do on your own and then being engaged in discussion on the subject. I do my reading because I want to learn the subject and don't want to be confused when we discuss the material in class. All the feedback I need, I get from doing practice problems and discussing the material with classmates and professors.
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I don't know of many great lawyers, but then again I don't (thankfully) deal with lawyers on a daily basis. I know of the crappy ones cause those damned ambulance chasers always have commercials running.
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This is incredibly true. 99% of the time you hear about a lawyer, its a personal injury lawyer just looking to make a buck.
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I only know of a couple people whom left gradschool in the hard science in favor of law school. They claim it to be pretty easy, but dealing with law to me seems rather mundane. You have to really like it to do good at it (though I suppose that's pretty much true of all subjects). I like research and laboratories and being able to us mills and lathes and understand the basics of electronics so I can make my own controllers and being able to program in a couple different languages and the thrill one gets when you combine all of that into a successful experiment. Plus the laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms in far off resonant dipole traps is dang cool....though I could have done without the nonlinear quantum optics.
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Like I said, I don't find law to be particularly easy though I do find it incredibly interesting. I was great in science and math until 10th grade (I was actually planning on majoring in chemistry), but I started doing better in history/politics classes and worse in math/science classes so I made the shift. I look at the amount/type of work my gf does and have absolutely no desire to emulate that.
