[RuleOfBirds]

Just out of curiosity, where does your experience with "non-STEM university and grad settings" come from that you are judging and contrasting it so harshly with STEM?

Seems like you've been in higher level STEM settings and your experience outside of that has been low level electives, you've had limited and unusually poor samples, or you're just speaking out of bias for (presumably) your own path in life.

I don't think people who are not "STEM" are generally going around navigating the world and school like uninformed, idiot freshman who don't know how to participate in their own education... At least not any more then people in STEM are ;-)

[watwut]

Not him, but I used to sign up to various courses while coursera was starting and free. Which means courses from American universities. Non-STEM were more likely to mandate questions if you want good grade. It was a fight to convince teachers that it is bad idea in online setting at first. They were also more likely to try to force or encourage discussion between students even when questions were not mandatory.

So I think that cultures are much different in that regard. A lot of it makes sense give topics that were taught. It is not that non-stem was inferior, it is that different topics have different pedagogy.

But, if students get points for asking question often enough, they will be trained to ask any question that cross their mind. They will be used to actively desperately look for any question to ask cause they are used to need that point.