Are we setting the bar too low?

It's no secret that when ranking the difficulty of majors, engineering and the physical sciences tend to be considered the most difficult and many of the humanities trail near the bottom.  Why is this?  I've often heard people say that they just aren't good at math (and sometimes science).  We know that the quality of STEM education at the K-12 level is poor in America.  Also, it is known that low performance tends to result in low confidence, which tends to lower interest in a particular subject.  I refuse to believe, however, that engineering and science are considered "hard" because the math is too hard.  I had poor preparation for an undergrad education in engineering, having attended a high school that didn't even offer calculus.  I struggled, but ultimately triumphed as a result of hard work.  With the many resources for assistance, most students can handle a technical major if they work hard enough.

Why are the humanities considered easy?  Why are they, along with business, stereotyped as having a student body more interested in partying than studying?  I believe that this stems from a lax curriculum in general.  In Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa state the importance of rigorous reading and writing standards in classes.  They discovered that students who took classes with 40 pages of reading per week and 20 pages of writing per semester tended to perform better on the Collegiate Learning Assessment than students with lighter work loads.  I, for one, rarely had this much work assigned in my humanities major.   Generally we were assigned around 20 pages of reading a week and two or three 4-6 page essays a semester.  Luckily I was given the option to write an honors thesis, which ended up a couple pages shy of three digits. 

The generally lax humanities curricula are unacceptable.  If universities want students to learn how to think critically and become better readers and writers, they need to follow the model already in place in STEM majors: practice, practice, practice.  One of the best classes I took required ten summaries of the daily readings over the course of the semester.  They were only one page single spaced and did not require us to give our opinions or thoughts, but it made us engage the reading more closely.  The rest of the work load was the standard three essays 5-7 pages in length.

Students will take the humanities more seriously if they require more work.  Grading of essays should also be stricter.  Students with fifteen grammatical errors on their first page should not receive a passing grade for the assignment.  There shouldn't be any majors at a university that allow lazy students to skate by with little effort while they enjoy the collegiate social life.  Not only will they feel more invested in their academic careers, but they also just might learn a thing or two.