As I read the rant by a College of Education student in last week’s edition of The Paisano, the first thing that stood out to me was that, instead of listing her real name, whoever wrote the piece was clearly too insecure in her views to sign under her real name. Veronica Mars is the lead character in a CW television show that aired from 2004 to 2007.

Veronica is a high school (and later college) student who moonlights as a private investigator. As someone who appreciates the importance of statistics, this seems like a bit too much of a coincidence. If this author wants people to take her complaint of education students being unfairly represented, she must step out from behind her curtain of anonymity.

The issue of statistics is actually a perfect lead-in to the true issue at hand. For “Veronica” to state that College of Education is “a model for the university as far as GPAs are concerned” is to say that all of the students in all of the other colleges are simply incapable of holding a candle to the extraordinary learning prowess of the College of Education students.

This is absolutely preposterous. Though I do not deny that we need teachers to bring up the next generation of successful students, that does not indicate that the work in education courses is more difficult than that in other colleges or that the grading in these same courses is not more lax.

As a College of Sciences student, majoring in computer science, I will not use my own college as an example so as not to show bias. Instead, let us examine the College of Engineering. Engineering is renowned, both on the UTSA campus and nation-wide, as an extremely difficult discipline to undertake.

Any branch of engineering is extremely math-intensive, with most students going deep into math and physics upper-division courses. We can also consider the architecture majors while we are on the topic of difficult colleges; these students regularly spend the night at the architecture building to finish the grueling projects that they are assigned, and they, like engineering, are renowned for their difficult major.

I want to be clear, I have no disrespect for the College of Education or the students within. That said, I do not think that they are, by any stretch of the imagination, taking on the hardest discipline on this campus. Therefore, if they are not in the most difficult discipline on campus, yet achieve a statistically significant positive difference in 4.0s compared to every other college in a given semester, then logic dictates that either grading is easier or the curriculum is easier.